The New Nap Time

Heaven help me, naps are happening less often 'round these here parts.

Both kids still are forced to retreat to their rooms between 1:30pm and 2:30pm every afternoon. Will only falls asleep a couple of times a week (he still needs one or two naps each week to "catch up" on sleep), and on the other five days he starts coming out of his room, asking if he can watch cartoons, have a snack, or do absolutely anything at all except sleep, about 30 minutes after he went in. Whether or not I let him get up depends on what I'm working on and my mood that day, but more and more I'm giving in to his requests to skip sleep. I require, however, that he play BY HIMSELF until the time frame for nap is over, because nap time is when I tackle everything that needs to be done but can't be done with kids around. Will usually follows this rule pretty nicely, so I'm not all that distressed about his nap situation.

When Will was Hallie's age he napped every afternoon for at least two full hours. A couple of times a week he'd sleep for three hours. And while we had to teach him to nap when he was a baby and went through one short nap protest stage when he was three, nap time for Will has been, for the most part, smooth sailing. On the hand, Hallie didn't need to be taught how to nap (or how to sleep at night, at least at first) - she knew what to do from the get-go. I should have recognized that early cooperativeness as a sign she would someday turn on me when it came to sleep...

Hallie fights nap and bed time every single day (I have some great stories about Tom and me trying to get her to bed at night, but I'll save those for another day/post), and completely avoids nap time sleep at least twice a week. Instead, after arguing with me for 20 minutes, yelling at me for 10 minutes, and crying for me for 10 minutes, she finally gives in reads/destroys books, makes up her own songs, and plays with her stuffed animals and dolls. One afternoon I heard quite a bit of conversation coming from her room so I grabbed my camera and snuck in.

Enjoying tea with Knuffle Bunny while sitting in her
American Girl DOLL chairs.  She has a really small butt.

"Hi Mom!"

The funniest thing about these pictures isn't that she's sitting in DOLL chairs, having a tea party with a bunny while she's supposed to be napping.  It's that when she went down for nap she was wearing an entirely different outfit.

The other activity Hallie engages in when she's not interested in sleeping is changing her clothes.  She'll start off wearing a cute and well-coordinated outfit and end up wearing red striped tights, blue polka dot socks (over the tights), teal and brown flowered mary janes, an undershirt, and a hot pink flowered sundress.  And to get finally land on this BEE-EEE-U-TIFUL outfit, she tried on everything in her dresser and left it on the floor of her bedroom.

So nap time isn't what it used to be.  I miss the days when 1:30pm meant a guaranteed two hours of "me time"...now 1:30pm just guarantees the beginning of nap time battles and the countdown to when I'll have to refold every single pair of Hallie's leggings.