Ode to the Nap Transition
Dropping a nap is, at once, the worst thing ever and the best thing ever.
Several weeks back, I realized that the baby was probably the age where she needed to get on a more consistent nap schedule. She’d been rocking the three-ish nap schedule for quite a while — I say three-ish because car naps, baby. She had a habit of falling asleep in the car and taking ten-minute power naps, and when you have two older siblings, you find yourself in the car a lot more often than all the sleep training books would like you to be.
But things weren’t going well. Our nights were terrible. Her day naps were inconsistent. So I came up with the bright idea to drop one of those naps, because, and here’s the key, I always forget how awful it is to go through the process of dropping a nap.
And so I entered blindly (and willingly) into a phase of self-induced misery. The poor child has never been a dream napper, and she’s also not the kind of kid who can happily stay awake for long stretches of time. Or go to bed early when she’s had a long day full of crap-naps. The two-nap schedule required her to do all three of those things, just…miraculously. Or, in our case, at the behest of Mom.
Of course the transition went as poorly as I expected. The first day she surprised me with a long morning nap and a decent afternoon nap, but didn’t want to stay asleep once I put her in bed at 6pm. The second day, she only napped for a half hour in the morning, leaving me to scratch my head and recalculate the nap situation for the day. And, you know. All of my decisions up to that point in my life. Something about bad naps brings out the worst in me.
Two weeks later, we’ve mostly-successfully come out the other end of it. (I say mostly-successfully, because she’s been suffering through a sleep-impacting cold/mild ear infection this past week, but I won’t count that against her, or let it derail our progress.)
Here’s the other key. Life on the other side is so, so much better. Like, 10,000 times better. Not to exaggerate or anything. But it’s true.
For one, I can almost certainly count on her to take a good nap in the morning. Her siblings attend a little daycare/school program in the morning, which my primary writing time. But if the baby ends up only taking a half hour nap initially, my writing time for the day is shot. It makes for a grumpy mom. And no one likes a grumpy mom. Least of all, Grumpy Mom herself.
Second, our afternoons are suddenly open wide. Which, for the older kids, is huge. Instead of having to rush to be home from wherever by 4pm so the baby can nap (and let’s not even talk about the panic of being in the car, trying to keep her awake), we can now spend every afternoon playing at the park. Or attending speech therapy. Or going to swim lessons. Or…whatever. If the baby falls asleep on the way home, heyo! It’s a bonus nap and doesn’t seem to affect her bedtime. In fact, it often has the added bonus of stretching her to her normal bedtime.
Third, if we don’t get that bonus car nap, she’s usually read for bed by six or so. Which changes the dynamic of our evenings, because when she’s happily asleep in her crib, I can focus on really giving the older kids the attention they crave in the evenings. I’ve taken to playing music on the speaker while I clean up the house and they have one last bout of playtime. What is this ideal life!
The best news of all is that there’s only one more nap transition to worry about — the dreaded two-to-one — and it won’t happen for a good three to six months, at least. So for now, I’m enjoying the smooth sailing that two naps bring. And I’m scheduling the middle child’s speech in the afternoons from now on, darn it.
Thanks for reading the latest in my motherhood series! Come back next week (or next month, as the case may be) when I’ll talk about the next parenting thing that’s popped up. Being a mom of three is a wild ride, but I’m making it through one day at a time.
