Naptime Schedule

As long as there are moms on the Internet there will be talk about sleep on the Internet. So many of us don’t get enough of it. We long for it, beg for it, read about it, talk about it, pray about and whine to our husbands about it.

This is another post about sleep.

My kids don’t need a ton of it, and I kind of do.

Andrew had already given up his nap when he turned two. He just wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep during the day, even staying awake in his car seat while I drove aimlessly through the streets of Dallas begging him to “just fall asleep already!”.

I’ve totally reconciled myself to Andrew’s weird sleep habits. He can stay up until 8:30, wake up by 7:30, never fall asleep on the couch and be perfectly happy most days. And he is almost five so this seems like a good schedule, he just got there really early.

But Caroline seems to need more sleep. She finally started sleeping through the night sometime around her first birthday which helped her feel more rested I’m sure. I switched her to one afternoon nap shortly before that birthday and she's done great on this schedule for a good year or so.

But now she’s almost two and a half, she’s learned to climb out of her crib and she doesn’t want to nap anymore.

“Not sleepy, mama. I want to play in the playroom. Not dark outside.”

So what to do? I’m trying for a “rest time” in her room, but I keep falling asleep in the chair with her trying to get her to rest and she never does. She gets up and takes all the clothes out of her drawers, and I wake up to a big mess and realize I’ve been asleep for 30 minutes.

This is so backwards.

Most days she’s okay without the nap, but we can’t keep her up or out late at all without it, which is not fun. We like to take them to dinner or friends’ houses occasionally and I don’t want to be tied to our house by 6:30 every day waiting for Caroline to turn into the NO NAP monster.

I know they sometimes go on nap strikes, so I’m hopeful this is what it is, although it’s been more than a few weeks now. But she’s pretty good about knowing when she needs to sleep. At bedtime on nap days she asks me to keep her nightlight on so that she can look at a book in bed before she falls asleep.

But on no nap days, she’ll say “darker please” and have me turn the nightlight off. She knows she needs to go to sleep earlier, clever girl.

It seems she's settling into a nap one day, not the next, kind of routine.

So I guess we’ll just get used to her sleeping habits too. And we’ll buy her a big girl bed, and I’ll be really sad to say goodbye to our crib.

…and our baby who’s no longer much of a baby

…and our naptimes

…and our quiet afternoons.