Sound the alarm! She's napping!

When my kids nap, I panic. And for good reason, I might add. My kids don't nap, they don't even go to sleep at night without a fight to the death. The last time Primo went to bed without a long, drawn-out ordeal, he had appendicitis. The fact that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow was, in fact, the deciding factor for us to cancel out trip to Iceland and bring him to the ER. The lower-left abdominal pain didn’t really convince me but the narcolepsy did. I knew something was seriously amiss.

Yesterday, we were tooling about in our apartment in the afternoon and while Primo read How to Train Your Dragon on the couch, and I checked my email, Sec grew suspiciously quiet. After a few minutes, I glanced over and saw her face down on the couch, arms dangling off the side like a drunk. I gasped. Then I strode over quickly and yelled, “SEC!”

She grumbled and turned her face to the other side. This was the real deal, not a Sleeping Beauty game. I dialed David.

“She’s asleep.”

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

I commonly refer to the kids as belonging only to David when they are either terrifically bad, terrifically good or entering some kind of distress.

“Shit,” David groaned, “Wake her up, quick!”

Ever since our kids dropped their nap, in Sec’s case as the ripe old age of 2.5, our rule has been to ALWAYS let sleeping children lie, unless they are sleeping in the daytime in which case, NEVER let them lie. Wake them, immediately, and forcefully, or else we will pay for the brief afternoon reprieve dearly, so dearly, at nightfall. But, there is a caveat: should the children be sick, they are allowed to nap.

“I don’t know,” I said to David, “I think she might be sick.”

I’d touched her forehead and felt that not-quite-a-fever-but-a-bit-more-than-flushed temperature. She had no other symptoms but the nap was compelling enough to make me clear our schedule for last night. (Yes, David and I DO stuff sometimes, don’t act surprised that we have a life.)

Sure enough, an hour later, the kid was running a 101 fever, and that was based on those shitty temporal lobe thermometers which are about as accurate as reading a temperature as I am telling time by the position of the sun. Baby was burning up. I let her sleep over an hour before she got hot enough that I woke her for some Tylenol. And I’ve been watching Snow White on repeat play ever since. Later we’ll talk about the fascinating shit I discovered from repeat watching this 1930s gem. It’s a little like watching the movie high on shrooms: you start to see crazy shit embedded in it. That’s for another day.

Let me end this post with a public service announcement in the vein of all those terrifying commercials about vaccinating your kids against the whooping cough (which you should totally do, by the way, seriously, they are right, though awful):

"Sometimes your child’s afternoon nap isn’t just a sweet little snooze but a cause for panic and alarm. Be on guard. Treat the nap with the suspicion it deserves. Brought to you by A Mom Amok."

The Death Knell of Naptime; or Screw-off, you moms with low-key kids, why don't you just let me gripe in peace?

On Labor Day weekend, David and I took the kids to a BBQ at the home of one of our closest friends. There on the deck we ran into some acquaintances, whose kids are similar in age to ours, and the mom and I were catching up, when she asked it I was having a third. Not third hot dog, mind you. Third child.

“Wow,” I said, because the sheer thought of that was so mind-blowing, so terrifying, so panic-inducing I literally could not speak.

”So, does that mean “Yes?” she teased.

“Oh God, no. Absolutely not, It means no.”

“Yeah, we’re done with two as well,” she said, “And honestly, I can never quite fathom
why people would want more than two.”

“Oh I can,” I said, “I can totally fathom it. In fact, I think I probably do want more than two. I think I would even have more than two if I led a totally different life. If we had a ton more money and a bigger house – hell, even if we didn’t have all that, I’d probably take the plunge if only my kids were more easygoing. But they are shaping up to permanent hell-raisers, and I think two of those is more than I can handle”

“Oh,” she said, shaking her head, “Kids are kids. They all have their moments.”

I looked over at her four year-old, whose hair was pulled into a perfect ponytail and who sat on a grown-up chair polishing off a hamburger without spilling anything on her nice dress. Evidence A that this child is not prone to “moments”: she wiped her hand on a NAPKIN. My children think napkins are for sketching and clothes are for wiping hands. And it’s not because I haven’t taught them otherwise.

“Mommy, I finished all my dinner, Can I have a Popsicle?” she asked politely as you please.
She really did finish all her dinner, too, a whole burger and some hummus and maybe even a few carrots. God for I knew, she’d sampled the couscous salad. My children’s idea of “I’m FINISHED!!!” is eating one Thumbelina-sized bite of plain pasta with no green stuff on it.

“She looks very well-behaved to me,” I observed.

“Well, kids are kids. They’re all hard work,” she retorted.

“Yeah, I guess,” I murmured. I mean, pets are hard work too, and so is gardening. So is blowing your hair dry so that it looks just like it did when you left the salon the day you got it cut.

Ok, that’s unkind. It’s just that I was envious of her well-behaved, non-exhausting, don’t-make-scenes-in-the-lobby children, who allowed her to have an adult conversation and fed themselves and pissed in the bowl, too. And I think that when you are fortunate enough to have one child like that, much less two, at the very least, you should admit you have it easy and allow parents like me, the owners of rugrat ragamuffin hellraisers, to gripe about our lot. It’s the least you can do.

I should have excused myself at this point but for some reason, I felt I had to prove just how hard I had it, and I mentioned that Seconda had dropped her nap – at 2.5 years old – can you imagine! And she told me, “Well, I just force mine to take his nap.”

I’m sure she didn’t mean to pass judgment. But mothers out there will understand that that’s precisely what she did. I got her message. My daughter had prematurely dropped her nap because I wasn’t firm enough, because I didn’t possess adequate follow-through, because I wasn’t strong enough to put her temporary discomfort in the backseat and make her long-term health my first priority. I got the message.

And that’s when a synapse snapped in my exhausted brain. “Force mine to take his nap?” Like I hadn’t?

For weeks now, every day at 1pm I have locked my child in a crib tent, closed the dour and listened to her scream for an HOUR. If that isn’t forcing I don’t know what is.

It just doesn’t work. She can rage harder and longer than me. She is more powerful and resourceful than I. The child howls, like a raging werewolf who’s coming off crack cocaine, for an hour, but still, I ignore her. I really do. People call on the phone and I pick up and conduct conversations while she howls in the background and my friends without children are like, “Should I call you back?” and I am like, “Oh, no, this is a fine time.”

The problem is, no crib tent can hold her. Somewhere in the middle of the unending scream-fest Seconda shimmies out of the crib and either climbs on top of the dresser, flinging piles of neatly-folded clothes and fragile, beloved items belonging to her brother onto the floor; or she clambers to the floor and pulls out every single book off her bookshelf, often tearing pages out, purposefully, in the process. She rips the feathers off her brother’s dream catcher. She eats whole tubes of Chapstick and sucks all the juice out of magic markers. She does these shenanigans until either I tire of speculating what havoc she’s wreaking on herself and the home, or she just opens the door and announces, blithely, “I took a NAAAAAP! Let’s get ICE CREAM!”

So I know a thing or two about forcing a child to sleep. And I know you can’t. Period. End of story.

Another friend said, “Well, why don’t you try just putting her in the stroller and going for a walk?” Its like she doesn’t know who we are talking about. These techniques work for other, run-of-the-mill children. These techniques, in fact, worked for my son. I got that kid to hold onto his nap for a whole year after he started striking. But my girl-child is bionic. Since the age of about four months she has never fallen asleep in a stroller and I can count on one hand the number of times she’s drifted off in the car, even on long trips to South Carolina. She is indomitable. She is indefatigable, literally. She is a force of nature. And she is done napping.