In the never-ending quest to close the Book on Project Get This Goddamned Child To Go To Sleep Already. Please, God! we have come up with Solution #901: No More Naps.
We think this might be The One. Yes, it’s true, we thought we had solved this problem with Solution #752: A Bottle and Two Books.
That worked for about a week. Then there was the revised version, Solution #812: Two Books, A Small Cup of Water and a Lullaby CD. Eventually this evolved into Two Books, A Small Cup of Water, a Lullaby CD, and a Two Hour Screaming Fit Complete with Houdini-Like Escape from the Crib. We thought we had embarked on the Holy Grail of solutions when we took the front rail off of his crib and replaced it with the toddler rail and all of a sudden, thrilled with the ability to get in and out of his crib as he pleased, bedtime became much less dramatic. I believe that I even went as far as calling it “easy”.
Seriously, that was stupid.
See, we failed to realize that once he could get in and out of his crib as he pleased he would GET IN AND OUT OF HIS CRIB. NON-STOP.
At first he only got up once in a while. We would find him watching TV in our bed or asleep in the upstairs hallway or turning up the volume on his CD layer until Brahm’s Lullaby could be heard three states away. Sometimes I would get up to pee at three in the morning only to have the ever-loving shit scared out of me after tripping over a small body lying at the foot of my bed. Getting out of bed “once in a while” quickly escalated to “every night, approximately ten seconds after we’d tuck him in and leave his room”. He’d demand one more book or one more cup of water. He’d want to be rocked in the rocking chair. He’d want to sleep in our bed.
Let me pause here to tell you something very important: I am weak. Oh, sure, I had envisioned myself as a take-no-bullshit type of parent. I’ve seen Nanny 911, and Dr. Phil, and enough re-runs of The Osbournes to scare me straight. I was not about to be pushed around by someone who still peed in his pants on a regular basis.
But then one night it happens. I’m trying to watch something very important, like American Idol, and this kid won’t stop whining. I get him a cup of water. I rock him in the rocking chair. Oh, fine, whatever. I let him come into my bed. Just for ten minutes. Okay, twenty.
Fast forward a month. Michael and Christopher are sleeping soundly, sprawled across our king sized bed, while Juan, my new lover in the form of a body pillow, and I have been forcefully relocated to the right-most half inch of the bed to sleep. Only I don’t actually get any sleep due to the near-constant need to pee, the intermittent kicks to the back, and the occasional elbow to the boob from the cute-but-impossible-to-sleep-with two-year-old who has recently repositioned himself on top of my hair.
And then the obvious dawned on me: come August, either this shit has to stop or this new baby and I are going to need our own room, preferably at a spa somewhere in southern California.
It was time to do the unthinkable: We took away Christopher’s nap. To be honest, naptime only resulted in an actual nap about 30% of the time and come bedtime the child clearly wasn’t tired, but I argued and pleaded and maybe even cried a little, because I just want ready to say goodbye to the possibility of a nap forever. It was all Michael’s idea and I’m still a bit bitter because he was right. Also because he gets to go to work while I’m left to fill ten hours of non-stop toddler time with fun and engaging activities. There are only so many times that a grown woman can play Thomas or read Digger Man in a ten hour period without losing her mind. Those two or three hours in the middle of the day were a much needed break, even if most of the time they were spent running up and down the stairs and yelling, “Are you kidding me? Get back in your damn bed. It’s naptime!!”
He now goes to sleep at 7. I won’t gush about how well it’s going because then I’ll have to stick my foot in my mouth and call myself an asshole when it all goes to shit in a week or two because, if we’ve learned anything throughout this process, it’s that everything works temporarily (See: Solutions 1 -900) but nothing works permanently.
I still mourn the loss of the nap but Christopher has managed to find some new friends to help get us through the mid-day slump: Barney and Poe and Lala and … oh, hell, I don’t know all of their names. I don’t even care. I’m just happy to have my two hours back.
