• Posted By landismom @ 11/05/2005 02:30:00 PM • • •
Saturday, November 05, 2005
to sleep, perchance to dream
Is there any better feeling, on a fall afternoon, than having a small child fall asleep in your lap as the two of you sit in a rocking chair? Cozy and warm, with a little human heat generator to ward off the afternoon chill...
The Potato has recently decided that he is too big to nap. (He's too big for a lot of other things too, if you ask him, as evidenced by his cries of "I big boy!" every fifteen minutes.) Landisdad and I do not concur with this decision, especially since he insists on getting up at 6:15 a.m., even on weekends. On the days that he is successful in winning the nap struggle, there are generally sixteen or seventeen meltdowns between dinnertime and bedtime. Not that much fun, especially on school nights when we are trying to cook, help the Bee do her homework, and make sure the kids get a bath once every six weeks or so before getting into bed by a reasonable hour.
There's not much we can do about the nap-at-daycare situation, so on weekends, we try to do whatever's in our power to get him to nap. Lately, that's meant sitting in the rocking chair with him, sometimes for an hour, to get him to fall asleep. It's a somewhat odd development, as the Potato is our 'good' sleeper. He slept through the night when he was a week old, and was always a great napper. And I know there are people out there who are cursing me out right now, but let me tell you, we deserved it. Because the Bee? Never. Slept.
When the Bee was born, we lived in an apartment in a duplex house. We moved there while I was pregnant, so we didn't know our upstairs neighbors tremendously well. It was an old, kind of shitty house and you could hear all kinds of stuff between the two apartments, and we really tried very hard to not subject them to a crying baby at all hours of the day and night. That meant that landisdad and I spent a lot of time holding the Bee while she slept, or sitting on the floor while she held on to our thumbs. (Yes, the Bee never had a comfort object--just "thumby.") When we finally did move into our own house, we had created a monster--a child who wanted to spend every waking--and sleeping--moment with her parents. By the time the Potato came along, we had been through the sleep wars, and I vowed, "never again." But we didn't have to have big battles with him about sleep, the way we did with the Bee.
I'm much more patient about the nap struggle, this time through. Partly because I know that it won't last--that eventually my son will develop the stamina to last the whole day without a nap. Partly because I myself have more stamina to sit quietly in a chair, slowly rocking, than I did with my firstborn. But mostly because I know it's not that much longer that I'll have a little kid to do this with. In a few weeks, he'll be moving out of the crib, and then I really won't have a baby anymore. I'm clinging to the last moments of his babyhood with a combination of pride and regret.
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