I have two kids who aren’t too keen on sleeping a lot. They’re both very early risers. For the last three and a half years, Keyan has rarely slept past 7am. His normal wake up time was between 6am-6:30am.

So you can imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks ago, Keyan didn’t wake up until 8:45am. And it didn’t just happen once, it’s still happening. If fact, this morning when I called to check on the kids from work, he had woken up at 9:40am! I thought, who is this child? What is going on?

We decided to measure him and he’d grown taller. He was also complaining of pains in his knee’s and such. Could it he be having a growth spurt and growing pains?

I looked it up on the trusty web and found out that this is experienced by 10-20 percent of kids starting around age three and peaking around age 8-12.

Some of the signs of a growth spurt are:

• Your child may seem hungrier than usual or eat more at a sitting.
• Your child may nap longer than usual or sleep longer at night.
• Your child may be crankier or clingier than usual, even though she’s not ill.