Tasty freedom coming soon! (For Jenny)

"Timing and signs of readiness for dropping naps is always a question for parents, even those who have done it before. It can be hard to remember all of the details."

Ah, parenting. It's like shifting sand (or wake boarding) ... just when you start to get your footing, it changes.

And doing it more than once doesn't mean you'll know what you're doing the second time. It just inflates you with a false sense of confidence that then gets burst.

Nate's been out of wack for his afternoon nap the past couple weeks. If you don't have kids, this sounds like a very minor detail. In reality, it's the same as saying that my life has sucked the past couple weeks.

He won't sleep but he's tired and cranky so he won't play nicely or even be reasonable. Some days, you can actually get him to go down but it takes a tremendous amount of skill and precision. You have to time every move perfectly (bottle of milk must be warm, you must snuggle but not smoother, you need to read a certain book, you can rock but you must be standing up, you must only sing the alphabet and you must be facing the window, etc).

Even then, you could fail. It's like trying to land a jet airplane in the Hudson River: it takes great concentration, you must draw on all of your experience and the stakes are incredibly high.

Okay, maybe not that much but a tired non-sleeping baby can really suck.

One good part is that standing and rocking a 25 lb baby for twenty minutes really is a good arm workout.

Anyway, I've been in total denial that he actually was trying to drop his second nap. After all, Mela did that by moving both naps later and later each day until the morning one was almost at lunch, and then it was easy to just drop the second nap.

Nate is still EXHAUSTED every morning at exactly 9 am, so how could he be trying to switch?? Even when my friend Jenny and I talked about her little one refusing to sleep in the afternoon, too, I didn't clue in.

Then finally yesterday, I consulted google and read this:

"Classic signs of readiness are when your toddler is ready to drop this nap, he will still sleep really well in the morning, but for the afternoon nap, he will hardly sleep at all. This is when he is ready to drop the morning nap."

Booooooo.

So my kids are different? No kidding but I don't appreciate this new territory.

For anyone out there in this situation, this is the advice I've now read/heard:

• Classic quote from my mom: "There will be a time when two naps are too much and one nap is not enough. They'll be crappy and may fall asleep in their dinner. You just have to stick it out."
  
  
• Try alternating some days with only one nap and then every few days, try to get two. This will help them get extra rest.
  
  
• On one nap days, the nap might be much earlier for a while (e.g. 10:30 or 11 am). Eventually, they should settle into a more afternoon style (e.g. 1:30 pm).
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• With all these changes, you may need an earlier bed time for a while (6 or 6:30 on the short, early, one-nap days). Once the nap moves later to the afternoon, the normal 7pm bedtime will resume.
  

The good news is, one nap a day means FREEEEDOM!!! It means actually being able to leave the house and do things. We will actually have a coulple of hours to go to the library, the swimming pool, the pet store, what ever we want! It will take a while to switch over, but once it does, we can finally start enjoying life.

Of course by then, it will be winter and playgrounds will be cold and snowy, but still.

A little bit of freedom will taste good.