Early to bed, early to rise?

This morning Anya decided that the day started at quarter to five. She did it in an utterly charming way, of course: waking up and moaning a bit for a feed, and then finishing off by murmuring a few of the increasingly speech-like babbles that she comes out with all the time, as if to say: "That's that done. What are we going to do today?"

Kate had a go at leaving her to see if she went back to sleep, but Anya wasn't having any of it. For a while she lay in her cot, chatting amicably to her bunny, but eventually she decided this was just boring and started wailing for someone to come down and play with her. After about 10 minutes of that you know you're either going to end up playing with her and both having fun, or lying in bed feeling miserable because you're listening to her being miserable. So the day started a bit early.

This is a bit of a change as she's actually been great on the sleep front of late. There's been backsliding and moments of weakness on both sides, but she is more or less sort of sleeping through the night now. It's just unfortunate that she considers the night as finishing somewhere around 5am.

As the nightest of night owls, getting up at 5.30 in the morning--and, moreover, being glad to do it because it gives me time with my baby girl--is not a situation I ever thought I would find myself in (and this morning Kate did it - I did it yesterday). But it's actually pretty fun: Anya's at her sparkiest and most amused with the world first thing, so you can have a good time watching her crawl around the carpet and climb stuff and generally shriek with laughter for no accountable reason.

I think she might have been up particularly early the past few days because there's been some crazy wind storms across the state for the past 48 hours, which have made it pretty noisy with gusts swirling down the street. All the same, Kate and I are scouring our baby sleep books to work out whether the solution is to put her to bed earlier, or later, or something else altogether.