I’m going to throw this one out to the hivemind, because I’m absolutely stumped here.

A while back, we decided to let the Monster have his iPad overnight, in coordination with the melatonin and occasional drugging to try to get him to sleep through the night.  My goal, frankly, is simple, and defers to a rule we used to (basically) have in my mother’s house – as long as we weren’t keeping anyone else up, it was okay if we weren’t sleeping.

Save that the last several mornings that I’ve gotten up for my daily walk/run, the Monster’s been up at 5 AM on his iPad.

Now, I’m not about to rescind this idea, since it is keeping him quiet, and anything that entails my being able to get a decent night’s sleep, coupled with his not being too tired to function during the day, is a good thing in my book.  But it does raise in my mind a serious question – how much is he sleeping?  Is he getting enough sleep, or are we just setting him up for some weekday morning where he’s impossible to rouse because of too many nights of too little rest?

Okay, so I could probably get a Fitbit or something and slap it on him, and use the sleep-tracking feature to see if I can’t use that to tell when he’s active, assuming he’d let me do that and that we’ll be able to see when he’s sleeping (as opposed to ‘awake but not moving a lot because he’s on the iPad’).  But that seems like a silly and expensive way to track a simple matter.

But it occurs to me that I’m probably not the only parent who has this question.  So… do any of you know of good software for iOS that can track app usage – preferably with times, so I can see when he’s actually waking up – that doesn’t require jailbreaking the device?  Or how do any of you deal with trying to figure out – shy of a baby monitor or CCTV – when your kiddo’s waking up in the middle of the night?