The dreaded dropped nap…
I’ll start with a leveler. Three kids is hard. It’s wonderful and rewarding and beautiful and fulfilling. But it is also exhausting, draining, intense, and tough. I sort of joked when the third one (Griffin, for the sake of a moniker) came along that I now had more children than hands. I didn’t realise that in truth the issue is that we had more children than there were parents. And that is the critical equation!
A few months ago we were at that stage when the baby would sort of just feed and sleep in an endless cycle. The biggest one (Piglet) is off at school all day and then the middle one (Dragon) would have a nice long nap in the afternoon, just after lunch.
Well today: it’s half term so there’s no school; the baby is flat out refusing to sleep out of arms; and the middle one has decided that mid-day naps are for 1-year-olds and she is very definitely two now!
Dropping the middle of the day nap sounds like something should happen organically, smoothly and almost imperceptibly. In truth, it’s more like the train that comes barreling on to the main road in the first dream world in Inception once they realise that they’ve entered a mind trained to defend itself (another Christopher Nolan reference, surely not?!). And that’s because, somewhat surprisingly, dropping a nap doesn’t seem to perfectly coincide with not being tired. You get all the hysteria, grumpiness and crankiness that comes with denying a child their sleep – except now it’s self inflicted.
In an ideal world with no other commitments, infinite resources and patience, and a dogged determination to put your child’s wellbeing above anything else; you would do the following at the point that a child starts to refuse to nap in the daytime:
- Pull all afternoon and evening scheduling forward by exactly the amount of time said nap would have taken. This means eating dinner at some crazy time in the afternoon and going to bed before the end of the normal working day
- Avoid any sleep-inducing activities in the gap between when the nap would have happened and when this new miraculously early bedtime occurs. This means no car journeys, no relaxing music and even careful consideration of not making your dining environment too comfortable. Falling face first into your bowl of pasta, anyone?
- Doing all of the ‘me time’ activities you might usually do while said child is napping in the non-existent hours between finishing up the jobs for the night and going to bed. This could include such luxuries as going to the toilet unobserved, having a cup of tea, prepping dinner, tidying up the wake of devastation that follows your every step or even just the pinnacle of luxury activities: sitting down.
Naturally this takes no regard for your or your partner’s working timetable, social expectations, other children or (God forbid) your own sanity. In particular it puts particular stress on the child who needs picking up from school by car who now has to be collected in mid-winter with all the windows open, blaring out loud “stay awake” music and with the firm and slightly deranged instruction to “just keep talking to your sister!”.
Another beautiful irony is that the child who has dropped the nap is not happy about it either. They will cry with frustration as you walk them around in a pushchair in the rain, unable to understand why you think they need to sleep. But they will then cry with exhaustion and confusion back at home as they ricochet from surface to surface in a delirious stupor.
Luckily, as a now highly experienced parent of three, I have the solution to this problem. In truth is painfully simple. All you have to do is…
…wait.
About 6 months should do it.
By that time they’ll have adjusted to not napping in the day and their normal sleep cycles will adjust slowly such that bedtime, dinner, and that evening chaos can return to slightly more acceptable time frames.
I did say it was painfully simple!
The good news for us is that today is probably the first time that Dragon has clearly refused a mid-day nap and so we’re just at the beginning of that 6-month period of chaos. And then we’ll probably get to go through it again with Griffin in about 18 months! It’s a good job I adore my three children as much as I do, otherwise I might start to sound a bit frustrated!
At the other end of the spectrum, I am very much enjoying reading books about quantum mechanics to my 7-year old, Piglet. I’ve never known anything get a child off to sleep so quickly. He gets to bathe in my apparently infectious enthusiasm for the craziness in the physics that describes the world around us for just a few minutes before he’s seemingly out cold.
Perhaps I need to start scheduling some quantum mechanics lunchtime sessions for Dragon. Is two too early for quantum? Surely not!
Toodlepips x
In other more food-related news: These are vegan and don’t have milk, soya or egg as named ingredients! Who knew?
