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.

The Losing of the Nap

First off, let me be clear that this is not a picture of my child sleeping. If you knew me at all, you'd have guessed that for two reasons.

A. When my child does nap, I do not sneak in to snap photos of her sleeping. I do not crack the door for any reason whatsoever. I leave the child alone and I try to breathe as quietly as possible in the adjoining room.

B. My kid doesn't nap anymore.

Yes, readers, I am in the tumultuous terrain of the terrible twos, known far and wide (in my apartment) as The Losing of the Nap.

Before you stop me and say, “Whoa now, my kid didn’t drop her nap ‘til she was 4 or 5,” or better yet, “We’re European and my kid is 12 and still naps!” let me rush to qualify that I understand not all children lose the nap as part of the terrible twos. It’s just the particularly ornery ones that do, the ones that you need to sleep more than anything in the world, because it is those two hours of peace that allow you to grab onto the frazzled end of your sanity and make it through the rest of the day. These ornery, defiant, devil-may-care children are precisely the ones that have the nerve to drop their nap well before they no longer need the sleep, creating a total friggin’ mess in the process.

It goes like this:

Between 50-75% of the time, Seconda does not nap, even when I put her to sleep at the appointed time in the appointed place. She just stands in her crib tent, which is zipped tight, and yells or throws things or cries or sings loudly for an hour or two. I get no rest during that time since I am too busy sustaining a coronary. Then I finally let her out of imprisonment, for which she is very grateful and sweet, for exactly 20 seconds,

The moment her feet hit the floor, and freedom is assured, she begins to act like a total, unmitigated little shithead. This may sound mean. In fact, strike that. It does sound mean. It sounds terrible. But what you should take into account is that I am actually being generous because saying she’s a shithead is a tremendous understatement.

My mommy friend, Grace, who has two kids just the same age and Primo and Seconda came over for a playdate yesterday. Sec had opted out of the nap and when Grace and the kids arrived at 4pm, she was not just a hot mess but an atomic mess. While the other children played, she spent about an hour screaming, for a reason no one could understand.

Grace looked pained. She looked CONCERNED. While I ignored my own child’s screaming, she tried to fix whatever was wrong.

“Do you want some water?” Grace asked Seconda.

Screaming.

“Do you want a snack?"

Screaming.

“Do you want to play with the pirate hat?”

Screaming.

My well-intentioned friend, of course, got nowhere/ She could not fix what was wrong because what was wrong was that my daughter didn’t get the rest she needs to maintain her mental health. Her exhaustion makes her a crazy person. And not just her, either.

It’s like my toddler has colic. Can you begin to understand the implications of that? A baby who has colic can, ultimately, be put down for a few minutes and left to cry so that you can take a swig of whisky or whatever you need to do to get back on board. A toddler just follows you around screaming. Toddlers weigh a lot more than newborns and carrying them everywhere will give you a hernia. Toddlers, unlike newborns, will purposefully hit you in the eye and bite you on your arm. Toddlers should never get colic. But mine has it.

Now, between 25-50% of the time (and that’s a precise figure I calculated) Seconda DOES take a nap. What bliss! What rapture! I work, furiously, while Primo watches Noggin. In two hours, she wakes and I am restored, just like Lazarus. It is amazing. And she is in a good mood too, doesn’t have the colic, and we are best friends and snuggle together and I am happy.

Then bedtime approaches. David and I understand that since she’s napped, she probably won’t be quite as tired at 7:30, so bedtime creeps closer to 8:30. At 11pm she is still awake, jumping in her crib and yelling “PRIMO WAKE UP! PRIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMOOOOO!”

David and I have no evening whatsoever. I pass out in my bed, listening to her yell.

But that is not all, folks, That is not even the worst part.

The next morning, she wakes at 5am. Five o’clock in the miserable morning. And if I thought she had colic from missing her nap, she has a raging case of it when she sleeps for only 6 hours.

So. Scylla and Charybdis. Damned in I do and damned if I don’t.

This isn’t exactly what you imagine when you decide to go off your birth control.

A Veritable Shitstorm

As you will recall from my recent post, my daughter is no longer napping. Last week when I posted about this development, the unfortunate consequences of this were three in number, namely that she

1. Goes on a ripping rampage of any stray papers left in her, or my adjoining, bedroom
2. Has robbed me of the two hours of relative peace and work time that my sanity depends on
3. Has been an absolute, unrivalled, misbehavin’ mess of a child after the hour of 3pm. It works like this: As soon as I give up on the day’s nap, after about two hours of listening to her yell and destroy things, I release her from her “quiet time.” She smiles broadly and is blissfully happy at her tremendous victory for about five minutes. Then she yawns. And she instantly turns into the spawn of – I won’t say the devil – but one of his close relations. She is totally, completely unmanageable. She stomps up to 10 year-old boys and smacks them in their bellies (that’s as far as she can reach) for no reason whatsoever. Babies literally skitter away from her in terror. She is the menace of Park Slope.

And for a while, I thought these three downsides were about all I was going to have to deal with, in terms of the no-napping fall-out. Naïve, naïve. There is of course, awful consequence number 4 to be grappled with and it is that during the time my daughter should be napping, she:

4. Paints her body with fecal matter.

Her own, I mean. I guess that makes it a little better. I don’t know – the gross factor is so obscenely high, it’s really hard to judge. What I am trying to say is my daughter likes to take a dump in her diaper and smear it everywhere.

This has happened twice. I think you will agree that that is two times too many.

Cleaning up after a newborn who’s had a major butt blowout is one thing. Cleaning up after your two year-old who is using her bowel movements as some kind of guerilla warfare tactic is another thing altogether.

And she’s cleverly quiet about it too so I don’t hear anything and don’t come around to inquire. I mean, I should be alarmed by the silence but we parents know full well that when 30 minutes of peace falls into your lap, you are not going to question it.

And that is why my house is in the midst of an actual shitstorm.

Tear shit up

Something unfortunate has occurred.

My daughter has stopped napping.

It’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, especially when you have an older child, but you just can’t quite believe that it’s time for it already. I mean, Seconda’s not even two and a half yet and I thought we had a good year at least of peaceful early afternoons before us. My son was at least 3 before he gave up his nap, and with him, it was a gradual process; he’d skip his nap for a couple of days, but I’d persist with our naptime ritual and he’d eventually cave in to sleep since there was nothing better to do, in the dark, in his crib.

Well Seconda has found plenty of better things to do in the dark. Not in her crib of course. That wildcat leaps out of her crib before I’ve even closed the bedroom door behind me. Most of the better things she’s found to do are highly destructive.

What I mean is, she likes to tear shit up. Literally. And the easiest thing to tear is, of course, books, Which in our house is tantamount to hurling the family’s crystal against the wall. I mean, I am willing to accept that my children do a lot of bad shit but tear up books?

“What did this book ever do to you?” I ask her, “All it wanted was to make you HAPPY and you’ve destroyed it!”

There was one time that Primo tore up his very beloved, very fancy, very expensive pop-up Wizard of Oz book. I don’t know if it was a masochistic thing or what, but it occurred during the tail end of the losing-the-nap period when he was stuck in his room for two hours with nothing to do. When I opened the door to release him from nap captivity, I saw all these beautiful bits of glimmering Emerald City and yellow bricks and pieces of poppy field scattered everywhere and I’m not going to lie to you, it hurt. I gave him such a stern talking-to then that he kind of has post-traumatic stress disorder about the whole episode. In fact, a year later, we were just sitting in the kitchen one morning talking and he told me that he had a horrible dream the night before.

“I dreamt that I tore up the Wizard of Oz pop-up book,” he said.

“That wasn’t a dream,” I informed him, “That happened.”

“No, no, that’s not right,” came his reply.

My stern reprimand scarred him enough that he hasn’t so much as dog-eared a page since.

Seconda, on the other hand. could care less about my little lectures or my time-outs or my yelling or my forcing her to read only board books until she proves that she deserves paperback again. During my stern talking-tos, she regards me with this bored kind of expression that is so awfully adolescent, I fear for the future.

“Whatever, lady, keep flapping your lips,” her eyes seem to say, “As soon as you turn your back, I’m ripping Puff’s face right of his magic body while Jackie Paper watches, then I’ll shred that sucker too.”