Little Dude's Naps
RIP
2017-2019
Fondly missed by his mammy
I used to hear other mums lament the day when their baby or toddler stopped napping… their faces would drop and their eyes would do a roll as they recalled the moment with absolute clarity, some part of them wishing it hadn’t ended when it did. I can remember my blood running cold when they’d recall the story, hoping that day would never come for my little dude. No that will never happen... not for ages anyway, I'd assure myself praying to the nap God's to keep my son napping for a bit longer!
And he has been a great napper… his regular snoozes have been my literal salvation, in fact at one point our lives where ruled by the all sacred, all holy nap times. I’d remember happily turning down invitations if it meant we weren’t back by nap time… they were sacrosanct and I didn’t want anything to interfere with our finely tuned routine that kept us all happy.
At one point, he used to have several naps a day. Each one punctuated our daily activity, until we were left with this final afternoon nap which I’ve been clinging onto stubbornly and for dear life.
Don't leave PLEASE DON'T LEAVE!
For the most part, his nap is a time when I can fire up the laptop and do some work, while I drink my first hot cup of tea of the day. If I don’t have a lot of deadlines on the go, then it allows me to maybe get a start on dinner, or washing, or tidy up… I’d love to say I used his nap time to just sit down and relax… but it never worked out that way and yet I would call these mini breaks in the day away from him as both essential and therapeutic in itself.
That might sound bizarre, but as a stay at home mum who works from home, I’ve found motherhood a challenging and lonely place to be in at times and to be really honest, I needed those small breaks away from him for my own sanity, to feel like me again, to do something away from the moniker of mammy for an hour.
But for the last week we’ve had NO naps….
How can this be happening? It's too soon...Yes, the world is ending!
As you know I’m 30 weeks pregnant on baby number two and now is the time when I really could have done with a few sneaky naps myself during his snooze, but for the last few weeks the naps have been hit and miss. He’d go up and simply play in his cot with his toys instead of nodding off… And you know what I didn’t mind that at all, in fact I know many mums who have replaced nap time, with quiet time, where the child has a rest and plays quietly in their room with their toys… down time without the sleep if you like.
That sounds ideal, and I’d be happy to go with that as the replacement to naps, but when your very determined toddler puts his foot down and says ‘I no need a nap today mammy,’ followed by meltdowns and hysterics and you just cannot face the physical battle of wills and bribery to get them up the stairs and into their bed for even some quiet time, being very pregnant and very tired, I just gave up making him have a nap this week.
I’ve been struggling big time with this intense humidity and heat during my pregnancy. The third trimester has hit me like a tonne of bricks and I’ve had to go for physio for my back. I simply couldn’t take the nap battle and instead I forwent them for the last week… it’s been a bit of an experiment really… his days are filled with activities, be it playschool in the morning and trips out and about in the afternoon or spending time with my folks, he’s pretty much been on the go all day and come the evening time I can see him getting more and more tired… and very ratty along with it. I think ultimately he is overtired this last week and I can see it in his behaviour.
Of course, the upside has been he’s nodded off almost as soon as his head hits the pillow, but that said, I do think he still needs some naps even if they are sporadic, so today as another experiment I faced the battle and popped him up for a nap to see what would happen after a full week without them and within about 10 minutes he was asleep, despite his protestations and instance that ‘I no need a nap today.’
Ultimately I do still think his naps are on the way out, but I also think cutting them out completely has been the wrong move… I think I’ll have to try putting him up every other day perhaps and see how we go… I don’t want to though, I would love nothing more than to hold onto nap time for dear life for as long as possible!