nap time – The Saucy Mama

Sometime last year, J gave up napping. It happens once kids turn two. They decide that napping is for the birds and stop doing it. The fools! As any parent knows, this often leads to late-afternoon crankiness. Unfortunately for me, J’s late-afternoon crankiness typically manifests in the middle of dinner and lasts until he falls asleep.

He has a fantastic ability to flip the switch on this crankiness too. Of the many things my boys can do, this one might be the most impressive. It starts with refusing to finish or even eat his dinner. We struggle to get a few bites in, then comes tubby time. He’s ok until it’s time to get cleaned up and out. That’s when the tears and the screaming starts. He becomes damn near inconsolable during clean-up, drying off, and getting dressed. If he’s feeling particularly cranky, it goes through teeth brushing as we settle down to sleep. There may be a few pockets of calm here or there, but it’s mostly loud and grating on the nerves.

As he gets older, the cranky-man tantrums are fewer and farther between — THANK GOD — but when they flair up, all I can do is take a deep breath and hang on for the bumpy ride until he falls asleep.

At the end of a long day, because it’s always a long day when this happens, I find myself praying for the patience of Job or a tequila IV, whichever is easiest. It’s days like this when I want to say, “Yea, f*ing right!” to anyone who tells me I will miss these days. Sure, I’ll miss the cuddles and the funny little things he comes up with, but I will be happy when tantrums aren’t the go-to method for communicating. I also know the day will come when waking him up before noon will bring its own frustrations. But for now, I’ll breathe my way through tantrums until I have to hold my nose to wake him up.

Ah, nap time. That time of day when the house is quiet, and you can finally hear yourself think for the first time since 5AM when your beautiful child first started wailing for your attention. If you’re lucky, this means you have roughly two hours to get things done around the house that you can’t do while the little one is awake because you don’t have eight arms. (I would take two extra arms over this belly that won’t go away any day. Amirite, Ladies!)

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do first. Do you mop that kitchen floor that, quite frankly, you can’t remember the last time you did it? Do you make lunch for the week? Do you clear out the spare bedroom that has turned into a junk room filled with so much crap that you just keep the door closed and pretend it doesn’t exist? OR, do you lay on the couch and binge-watch whatever Netflix show you’ve been meaning to watch for months, but between work and everything else, you haven’t found the time?

As we are now in the age of self-care, sometimes a little Netflix and chill is what you need. Sometimes a nap is what you need — the little dude isn’t the only one who needs to recharge his batteries! So you make a deal with yourself: nap hour one, you relax; nap hour two, you cross off one of the many items on your To Do list. You take some time to yourself and curl up on the couch with the remote or maybe that book you’ve been carrying for two months and haven’t made it even halfway through, and you relax. You relax so much that you lose track of time, and hour one bleeds into hour two, and as soon as you get up to tackle that chore, your sweet angel starts crying or giggling or, like my angel, says, “Uh oh.”

That’s when you know you’re screwed, and the thing you meant to do will now be infinitely hard to get done because, as established earlier, you don’t have extra arms — God, I really wish I had a few extra arms!

Tag: nap time

Cranky-man Syndrome

Nap Time Procrastination