To nap or not to nap

Yesterday, I did the unthinkable. I declared an end to naps. Just for my 2.89 year-old who had been bucking the weary system for nearly 10 days. As the system administrator most days, I concluded that the resources expended  versus the product rendered created a ratio that was no longer worth pursuing…i.e. 20,30,40,50, even 90 minutes of trying to get O to sleep, versus total minutes slept = 0.  Not exactly rocket science.

For nearly 3 years, we’ve had a predictable break in the early afternoon. Our lives as parents have literally revolved around O’s naps. We plan errands, work schedules, personal hygiene, cooking, phone calls, employment, car trips, parties, and airline travel around the nap mandate. Naps have been like tides – something we can count on and something we must respect and plan for. Declaring the end to this institution has turned my world upside down. Mostly, I do a lot of semi-noisy deep breathing. The consequences are multi-fold…

1. First, I don’t get a “break” (defined here as having 1.5 hours of the day with just one child under the age of 3, as opposed to the usual 2 or occasional 3).
2. Second, O is disastrously tired without the nap and so we see incessant whining, irrationality, and sporadic melt downs.
3. Third, since she is falling apart by 5, bedtime now hovers around 6:15 pm – out of necessity. Though we always thought this would be boon for us.. you know, kids both asleep by 7, time for us to talk to each other, hang out, etc. To our surprise, it also means that we are basically homebound after 6 pm and a menace to anyone within our walls after that time. Doesn’t leave much in the way of night life (don’t laugh.. there is nightlife out here!)
4. Fourth, Nola’s afternoon nap is threatened by the loud sounds of an unsleeping but exhausted and cranky preschooler. We’ll leave it at four then.

The one thing that does sometimes work at naptime is to “drive her down”. This might create some guilty resonance with the other parents out there. Not exactly a carbon-neutral parenting practice…my guilt finally arm wrestled my nap dependence and won. So, without the option of driving her down against the backdrop of failed attempts at getting her to sleep via cuddling, singing, silence, shshshing, rocking, strollering, bribing, reading, books on taping, and ignoring, I surrendered.

Then, last night, I was enviously talking with another parent whose kid still naps at a much older age and started to feel that itch again…the one that compels to just try one more time or to try one more thing …just to do whatever necessary to get that nap back on our map. Then, someone else said, “you run on biodiesel so it’s not that bad”.

I am writing this post as O sleeps peacefully in our car outside my kitchen window. I can see her little cheeks drooping now with the relief of much needed rest. It only took 17 minutes to “drive her down.” I promise to stop… maybe when she turns 3. In the meantime, I will continue wrestling with my competing goals: reducing my carbon emissions and minimizing my grumpy mommy/grumpy toddler/grumpy baby emissions as well.