Nap Time

 

Eli has decided that he is pretty much done with taking naps. It's been going on for a couple of months now. Lily was over four years old before she gave up naps all together (and it may have been even longer if she hadn't started going to school in the afternoon)so this just seems really early to me. And yet I know that it's not. We fought it for a while, but I think we have officially given in to his refusal to nap. He does have "quiet time" for a bit in the afternoon when he would have been napping, but he doesn't seem to grasp the idea of quiet time quite as well as Lily and usually they end up playing upstairs together after a brief period in their own rooms. I think we'll have to work on that at some point. For now we are still adjusting to this new routine. Most days it just seems to go better without the nap. But every now and then he's clearly over tired and in need of a precious nap (like today) and he will go to sleep quite willingly. It's a beautiful thing until bedtime rolls around that evening and it takes him a good hour or two to fall asleep. So really he's getting about the same amount of sleep with or without the nap. So most of the time, unless he seems to really need it, we let him go without one during the afternoon. Unless of course we are driving somewhere longer than 10 minutes during mid-afternoon. In that case he often falls asleep in his car seat quite on his own. In fact I'm pretty much helpless to stop it. And the above photos are proof of what results. We bring our sleepy little boy into the house and lay him down in the nearest cozy spot we can find...our bed, the recliner, the dog bed even!:) And there he will nap sometimes all still bundled in his winter gear! The other day this happened quite late in the afternoon and I tried oh so hard to wake him up because I didn't want him napping until dinner...but no matter what I did I couldn't get him to stay awake! What can I say...this nap thing is a delicate balance these days!