The Summer of No Naps

Teyla, bless her heart, has given up napping for the summer.

(Bless my heart, while you’re at it.)

It’s not that she doesn’t need the sleep. She’s a whiny, temperamental drama queen by 5:00 PM most days. It’s more that conditions aren’t right for napping right now. There’s too much noise, fun, craziness, hoopla to sleep in the middle of the day. And I don’t have the time to lay down with her and coax her toward dreamland, as I used to do before Kieran was born.

So she stays awake most days, and we muddle along and give extra grace during the pre-dinner meltdowns and wait for blessed September when routines make their return.

Still, she is tired. (Bless her heart.) If I can time our daily activities so we are driving home around 1:30 PM, she will zonk out in the car for a brief respite. Occasionally, she’ll lay down on the floor right at lunchtime and fall asleep with a Little People figurine tucked under her chin.

Or she might do what she did yesterday, which is to resist the nap all the way until 4:30 PM, at which point she suddenly yawned and curled up into a ball and built an invisible chrysalis around herself, and nothing I could do would rouse her, not even rubbing her back and moving her arms and legs and whispering sweet promises of ice cream into her ear.

She didn’t wake up until 6:00 PM, when dinner was almost ready and her Daddy was on his way home.

I know I shouldn’t have let her nap that late. I should have tried harder to wake her up after just a short snooze. Or maybe I shouldn’t have let her indulge the sleepy at all.

But the quiet. It was so blissful. And I love to watch her sleeping, a sprite with curly hair and peaceful breaths resting on my sofa.

I paid for it later, when she was wide awake and singing at 10:30.

But to be honest, I didn't really care.

Because she needed that. And so did I.