I hate the process of getting my daughter to take naps. I enjoy the naps, but the Twister-style contortions we have to go through to convince her to take them in the first place are beyond frustrating.
For those who don't read this blog all the time, here's a recap: I use a yoga exercise ball to bounce my daughter into submission for her first nap, usually at around 9am. She then sleeps in my arms for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. This makes it hard to do anything but sit in my rocking chair and watch subtitled movies at a really low volume. Granted, I really like my Criterion-watching time, and I love holding my daughter in my arms while she sleeps so peacefully.
This nap experience has been so significant that I have even considered writing a book about it, a parenting memoir crossed with film criticism. I may be the only target market in existence for such a book, but writing it has crossed my mind :)
But this napping situation is not sustainable, and it’s been going on for too long (she’s almost a year old, for crying out loud).
The morning nap process, while frustrating, is much less annoying than the afternoon process. This consists of, after meeting my wife for lunch (and a nursing session for Eleanor), driving around Denver for a very long time, waiting for Eleanor to go to sleep so I can transport her entire carseat into her room without waking her. Granted, she likes to sleep in her carseat, and she sleeps well, but I am tired of driving all around town in the hopes that she will fall asleep.
This afternoon, after a 1-hour sleep session in my arms this morning, Eleanor didn’t want to take a nap in her carseat after we met Katie for lunch. That made sense, as it hadn’t even been three hours since she woke up from her last nap.
But this was the way we did naps, so I was determined to just keep driving until she fell asleep.
Then I started thinking. Who does this routine serve? I wanted Eleanor to go to sleep on my terms so I could take a break from parenting for an hour or so. I wasn’t driving around town for her; I was doing it for myself. As that realization sunk in, with the air conditioning cranked up and the radio silent (both environmental conditions designed to encourage baby sleep), I made a decision:
Eleanor’s naps aren’t about me and my needs; they’re about hers. I caught myself not treating my daughter as a human being but as a thing that needed managing. That’s not a flattering place to find one’s self. I was miserable driving around town with no purpose other than making my daughter sleep. My daughter was miserable because she was sitting in the back of the car with nothing to do but stare out the window and talk to herself.
For the first time in a while, I made the decision to just go home. I unbuckled my daughter, and we played in the living room for while until she started to get quiet and (maybe?) sleepy. Then, I dragged the yoga ball, a couple books, and my daughter into her room. We read a couple of stories, I bounced her on the yoga ball until she fell asleep, and then I put her in her crib (a much more obvious place for naps, don’t you think?). She woke up during the transfer, but by now I was already committed. I said, “It’s naptime. I love you,” and I closed the door to her room. She talked to herself and cried for 15 minutes. But she finally fell asleep. For 35 minutes!
She usually takes 90-minute naps in the afternoon, but I’ll take this as a victory. A victory over my selfish needs and a victory for my daughter’s resilience and maturity.
***
Part 2
(As often happens, I wrote the above half of this post earlier in the week. The situation has changed.)
Well, we’re almost a week into the new nap scenario. After the short but successful nap that Monday afternoon, I decided to bite the bullet and plunge full into crib naps. It hasn’t been easy, but it hasn’t been as hard as I expected. Eleanor hasn’t cried for more than 20 minutes for any of her naps, and by Thursday, she was taking two naps a day, of normal length, and she seemed as cheery as ever when awake.
I’ve realized that Eleanor will never remember our naps in the easy chair and the Criterion movies. After a few more days, she probably won’t even remember the carseat naps either. I will remember all of it, though, and I feel a sense of loss for the intimacy of these naps. My daughter will never again be small enough to fall asleep in my arms. I haven’t been able to watch any movies during her new morning crib naps -- it feels like we something we did together. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are my morning nap break TV shows, now.
I do hope, however, that maybe my love of movies has passed down to her through the osmosis of these naps. Maybe she’ll even read these words, someday, and then she’ll decide to watch some obscure Japanese movie from the 1960s, just out of sheer curiosity.
And hopefully she’ll love it.
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