Contemplating Tranquilizers

If you are not a reader of my Other Blog then you are blissfully unaware of the current Nap Strike situation going down at Camp Cheung. Lucky you! (Your trusty blogger gleefully rubs her hands together. People who are not sick of her whining about naps! Fresh meat!)

So let me give you a little refresher. There was some nap weirdness going down in the weeks before Easter. Flailing, whining, all out refusal to sleep. It was enough weirdness to drive me to the brink of I'm Going Back To Work And You Can Stay Home With YOUR Son. My sanity was demanding a solution, so over Easter weekend I instituted what I will call Nap Training. Nap Training consisted of watching my baby for the appropriate sleepy cues, wrapping him in a blanket, popping the pacifier in his mouth and gently depositing him in his crib with an, "It's naptime, Jack! Night night!" and shutting the door.

I'd been rocking this kid to sleep and suddenly he didn't want to be rocked anymore. And I didn't want to rock him anymore, seeing as how I am expecting a second bundle of sleep deprivation come September and OH GOD HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO PUT TWO BABIES TO SLEEP?

I thought a week or two of Nap Training would do the trick. It'd worked before and had been going nicely, until the Dreadful Teething Incident of January 08 had royally gummed up the system. So I had every confidence! Every hope!

Except we have been practicing Nap Training for nearly a month and instead of improvement we're dealing with a slow sucking away of my will to live.

He'll sit in his crib anywhere from five minutes to an HOUR before he falls asleep. Occasionally he'll let out an indignant whine or a couple of "I have a MEAN MOMMY!" cries, but mostly he's just sitting there talking to his feet and rolling from one end of the crib to the other. I'll check on him and he doesn't even want me to pick him up. He LIKES his crib! But the last two or three days have seen increased crying and howling. A more frequent voicing of displeasure. When I check on him it seems like he's so tired, so ready to fall asleep and he just can't. Which is why I've ended up rocking him to sleep three or four times. BAD NAP TRAINER!

But I have no idea what's going on. Is he transitioning to one nap already? Is he not tired? Did the nap schedule change and someone forgot to tell me? Is he uncomfortable? Hot? Need a diaper change? Cranky? Teething? Sick? Bored? Just having a hard time falling asleep on his own? I give up.

Oh, and I know you're going to ask me how he's sleeping at night so let me just say: LIKE A DREAM.

I know. It is baffling. We have all the nation's top sleep scientists working on this aggravating issue and the results are inconclusive. The best I've got right now is a sympathetic look from a mom of a two-year-old who simply said, "The months before switching to one nap were rough."

I had to physically shut my own jaw. MONTHS? Are we talking MONTHS of transition?

I've been attempting flexibility, a very hard thing for someone as Type A as myself. "Self," I scold, "Could you please relax a little? Just try waiting a little longer to put him down. See how it goes. If that doesn't work, we'll try something else. THE SKY IS NOT FALLING." But upon hearing that I may be looking at months of nap weirdness, I have now retooled my coping method. Silly me for thinking I had any control over this nap business. Now I'm just praying it works itself out before Baby Number Two arrives to disrupt everything else.

And if it doesn't? I won't be pregnant anymore, so at least I can accompany the sounds of not-napping with a glass of wine.

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