Well, things have changed. I'm sure my sisters, who are both still firmly pro-nap (and whose kids both nap AND sleep 12 hours a night, a feat my kids have never, ever managed), think I'm crazy. But I actually can't wait for Lucy to give up her nap. Now, I find that naptime is restrictive, particularly since the kids sleep a little later than they used to. Yes, when Finn would rise at 5:30 in the morning, it was easy to do a LOT and still be home by 11:30 for a nap. But we try to roll out of bed as long after 7:00 am as we can get away with. And now that TV rules have been relaxed, wake up time is followed by lounging and coffee-drinking while the kids entertain themselves with mind-numbing TV. It's a challenge for us to get everyone out of the house earlier than 9 or 10, a far cry from the early days of parenthood.
We could, of course, get our act together and get out of the house earlier, and make napping more of a priority. But we already have one kid that doesn't nap. Finn stilled napped when Lucy was born - he was only two and a half then, and still pretty good about going down. By the time we got Lucy on to a semi-regular nap schedule, though, Finn was already fighting the nap, and fighting it HARD. By 3, I gave up the war. Finn still napped at school, but not at home. I can count on one hand the number of times we got both kids to nap at the same time on the weekends.
So, we're already up with one kid anyway. We might as well have them both awake so we can go out and DO stuff, too. We are getting closer to that new reality. Lucy still naps at school (though her naps have always been shorter at school than at home), but weekend naps are intermittent at best. Not because she fights the nap - she doesn't. She usually falls asleep for us pretty quickly, and sleeps for over two hours. Yet this weekend, I didn't put Lucy down at all. She didn't melt down into a ball of hot toddler mess, she was fine.
And the best part? She goes to sleep INSTANTLY at night. Tonight I put Lucy down, went in to tuck Finn in, and grabbed each kid a cup of water from the kitchen. By the time I went in to Lucy's room to give her the water, she was out. Despite the fact that I heard her calling out to me no more than 3 minutes before then. The silence was music to my ears, because on the days she naps, we often have an hour or more of shenanigans coming at us over the monitor, and more than one trip back up to her room.
Yes, I am firmly in the anti-nap camp now, proud to be a member.
Unless we're talking about grown up naps, of course. I strongly, strongly support the naps that I take.
How about you? Are you wedded to the nap? If your kids don't nap anymore, at what age did they give it up? Do YOU nap? :-)
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The kids and I had a pretty good day together - the snow stayed away, Finn went to his last swim class of the current session, we ate lunch out where the kids were shockingly well-behaved, and we watched two old school Disney movies - The Aristocats and The Sword and the Stone. The kids are bathed, both are asleep, and I have only 12 more hours left as a solo parent. Yes, we relied heavily on the television to get us through the day. Yes, that was in part due to the fact that I am trying my darnedest to finish reading Game of Thrones. I am totally sucked in, and yet no matter how much I read, I only seem to be able to move a percentage or two on the Kindle. It is apparently a freakishly long book. There may have been a little benign neglect from all the reading. Just a little, though.
Some pictures from the goofing around that occurred today:
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