We had a rough morning. Daniel seemed to sleep a little better last night (after a complete meltdown at bedtime and resulting night terror about two hours later), but still woke up in a horrid mood and had two time-outs before even going downstairs. I could have told him we were having ice cream for breakfast and he would have pitched a fit.  He pulled it together for swim class, but again protested going down for nap.  Thankfully, FINALLY, he took one today. Three cheers for the new blackout shade.

Went up to get him from nap, he took a solid 2+ hours.  Walk in, strange smell. Diaper in hand.

“Daniel, why did you take off your diaper?”

“Because I had to pee.”

“Where did you pee?”

“In my bed.”

Indeed. The whole bed was completely soaked. The diaper was dry as a bone.

What could I even do? The pee was cold, the incident had passed. The morning, the week, had been so intensely frustrating and draining, I had nothing left in the tank. If I got upset about this, it was clear I was going to straight-up flip my lid, possibly burst into tears.  So I complimented him on knowing that he needed to pee, and suggested that the next time he felt that way, he could just go to the bathroom across the hall.  I mean, at least he recognized he needed to go?

Good lord.

You could make the argument that my biggest fear about switching to beds has come true.  But, to be completely honest, the writing was on the wall for several weeks prior. I can’t blame the bed.

Daniel is trying to drop his nap.

It’s a highly intentional act, consistent in tone to other behavior/control/defiance issues we’re dealing with.  Over the course of the last week, in particular, he has become very conscious of the fact that he can control whether or not he goes to sleep at naptime.  For the first time in two and a half years, he is seriously protesting taking a nap.  “I’m not tired.” “I don’t need to sleep.” “I don’t want to take a rest.” “I’m all out of energy to sleep.” “My yawn says that it’s time to play outside.”

It’s a nap shitstorm over here.  You’ll excuse the profanity, and understand that I’m actually showing a lot of restraint right now.  Between the skipped naps, the heat and humidity, and the lack of central air conditioning, the only words I actually want to speak are of the four-letter variety.  I’m trying to hold it together in front of the kids, but with only moderate success.

Every day, I wonder how bad it’s going to be.  If he outright skips the nap, he can seem somewhat agreeable for a little while. But the truth is that he’s a ragged edge, just waiting to snag on something and completely lose it.  That nearly always happens by dinnertime.

If he messes around for an hour and a half (or two hours, OMFG), and then falls asleep, I end up having to wake him around 4:30, just so he’ll have some chance of going back to sleep at bedtime.  That is, universally, a nightmare. He’s nothing short of horrid when you wake him up. Hysterical sobbing, can’t listen to anything, pitches a fit about everything.  A bad nap is actually worse than no nap at all.

And once in what seems like a blue moon, he goes up there and falls asleep within 30-45 minutes, takes a nice two-hour nap, and is the delightful child that is hiding under the nap-beast I see most days.

When I talk to people about the difficulty we’re having, it’s amazing to me how many people leap to the conclusion that it must be time to give up the nap.  To which I would like to say, HELL TO THE MOTHERFUCKING NO. (sorry, couldn’t keep that one in.)

Yes, maybe the nap is in the beginning stages of phasing out.  It has to happen sometime.  I have had my moments where I wonder if it’s time.

But then I watch the behavior. Only on the days when he has a “normal” nap is he the happy, delightful version of himself for any extended period of time.  Yes, that sometimes means he sings for a while at night, but I’ll take it if he’s actually happy and friendly during his waking hours.  Sometimes he fools you, holding it together pretty darn well when he skips the nap.  But more often than not, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Today, I thought I was a shoo-in.  Took them swimming for over an hour, which is usually guaranteed to wear them out.  Plus, it’s quite hot, which always makes me more sleepy. Put them down right on time (sometimes nap gets pushed late, and though he falls asleep a little sooner, it’s the messed-up-nap shitstorm as described above).  Yeah. Daniel didn’t sleep AT ALL, and Rebecca (who often takes herself up for naptime) only slept an hour.  KILL ME.

For those who say he’s just not tired?  Guess what he did for the first time in MONTHS when we were coming back from the mall (woo, air conditioning)?  Fell asleep in the car.  And just for some added fun, peed through his shorts (screw you, potty training).

I’m not sure there’s much of a solution to this one.  I can set up rules and boundaries for that time I designate as “naptime,” but I cannot force him to go to sleep. (Apparently using tranquilizers on toddlers is “frowned upon.”)  I know that I’m right.  I know that, most days, he absolutely does need that nap.  But being right isn’t worth much at the moment. It doesn’t get us any closer to a well-rested child. Unfortunately, I think I just have to wait this one out.

In the meantime, I’m not exactly the picture of maternal patience. As all of my mom friends know, the kid not napping is a major source of stress and barrier to getting things accomplished.  When he’s up there messing around, I feel like I can’t even go upstairs.  Can’t take a shower, can’t mess around on my sewing machine. Can’t even sit downstairs and turn on the TV at an audible volume, because he insists on turning off his white noise machine.

Oof. Can a girl get a frosty beverage over here? Stat?

I always wondered how young babies are when they start to dream. Do they always, from day one? Is it later, when they start to become more aware? Who knows.

I have long suspected Rebecca is a vivid dreamer. She’s a restless sleeper, and it’s not uncommon for her to wake in the middle of the night, seemingly distraught and in need of a pat on the back. But she’s usually still sleepy enough that she doesn’t say much about what’s bothering her and goes right back to sleep.

Daniel, on the other hand, sleeps like the dead. Sometimes, when I go in to check on them before I go to bed, I have to poke him so he’ll move enough for me to know he’s still breathing.

He woke up crying late last night, very uncharacteristic. I went in to check on him.

“Mommy, I’m so sad! I’m weawwy weawwy sad!”

“Oh, buddy, why are you sad?”

“I’m so sad, because they took all the phones!”

A hug and some vague reassurance about the phones, and back to sleep he went. As did I, with no more doubt about whether toddlers dream.

I can’t really complain.  Ever since sleep training at 6.5 months, my kids have generally been very good sleepers.  A hiccup here and there, but overall solid.  Whatever combination of good luck and good habits have gotten us there, I am grateful.

Especially so that my kids tend to start the day at the incredibly reasonable hour of about 7AM.  Sometimes they wake up earlier and chat for a while, sometimes they sleep even later and don’t require my attention until nearly 8. (Insane! I know!)  The trouble is that, every now and then, Rebecca will wake up extra early (like 5:45 or 6AM).  Not only have I grown so used to the luxury of 7-7:30 that I can’t handle the sight of a 6 on the clock, but she tends to be pretty cranky if she gets up at that hour and clearly needs more sleep.  And yet, shockingly, my attempts to tell her that it’s “too early” or “not time to get up yet” have fallen on deaf ears.  Since, brilliant though my children are, they cannot yet tell time.

Enter: the Good Nite Lite.

My friend Rebecca got one first, on recommendation from someone in our twin club.  After hearing her raves, and a few extra early (and cranky) mornings, I hopped online and got one for myself.  The deal is that you set your bedtime and wake-up time on the clock.  At bedtime, the light turns on and is a blue moon.  The blue moon stays on all night.  At wake-up time, it changes to a yellow sun.  The sun stays lit for a couple of hours, and then turns itself off for the rest of the day.

Want to know how long it took my kids to adjust to their new light?  Approximately 15 seconds. Seriously.  It arrived in the mail, I set the time and put it up in their room.  That night, I told them that the blue moon means it’s nighttime and time to sleep.  When it turns to a yellow sun, that means it’s morning.  They thought it was very cool.  And the next morning, at 7AM on the nose, the excited shrieks came from their room.  “MOMMY!  Sun is yellow mommy!  Means it’s daytime!  MOMMY! Sun is YELLOW!”

A couple of times, Rebecca woke up cranky while the moon was still blue.  I went in the room and asked her what color the light was. “Blue.”  And what does that mean? “Nighttime.”  It wasn’t an ungodly hour in the middle of the night, so I didn’t really expect her to fall back asleep.  But I offered her a book to read in her bed, and told her to tell me when the light turns yellow.  And then I walked out.  And that was that.

This is genius for toddlers and preschoolers.  It gives them a way to understand daytime and nighttime, even if sunrise is early (though we do have blackout shades in their room) and they can’t read a clock.  They have the independence to figure it out for themselves, and it removes the burden of argument.  It’s not that mommy is making me go back to bed.  It’s that the clock says it’s nighttime.  End of story.

The only down side is that the days of sleeping in (or, at least, lounging contentedly in their beds) seems to be mostly gone.  While I don’t think the yellow light is enough to wake them up if they’re asleep, I suspect much of the time they’re already quietly awake, and see the change of color, and immediately feel the need to notify me of this event.   And on the “minor annoyance” front, the light does have to be plugged in, but does not come with a long cord (just the outlet plug coming straight out of the back).  So I kind of had to jerry-rig an extension cord to hang it on a mostly un-used lamp.

But those two small complaints aside, I love this thing.  It resolved a somewhat minor but annoying issue in our sleep routine (and, as we know, better-rested kids are happier kids, and happier kids make happier moms), and removed a power struggle.  At this age, I will be grateful for small victories.

Disclosure: I was not compensated, or in any way asked, to write about this thing. I just like it, and thought you should know!

My kids were never really pacifier junkies.  We used them when they were little, but Daniel gave his up on his own (much to my chagrin, at the time) when he was five months old.  Rebecca continued to use hers, but it was always primarily a sleep thing. Not much use during the day or out and about, and since she turned a year old, she would throw it onto the crib mattress herself when she was ready to get up.  No idea whether it was just a personality/temperament thing on her part, or something I got lucky and managed to not allow to become a huge habit, but anyways, we’re lucky.

She kept it for naps and bedtime all along, which doesn’t bother me.  The only exceptions to the “paci in the crib” rule are generally for illness or travel. Hell, the only vaguely recent picture I could find of her and the paci was when she had an ear infection in Florida.  I figured we’d ditch it eventually, but I wasn’t in a huge rush.

Except that, when I got her up from nap this afternoon, I noticed it was busted.  Frankly, it’s amazing it lasted this long.  It’s the same WubbaNub that I got as a shower gift when I was still pregnant.  But recently I know she’s been chewing on it more, and then yanking it out of her own mouth.  So not a shock that it was almost ripped in half after nearly two years of use.

I figured I might as well seize the opportunity, rather than hunt around the house for another pacifier.  Somewhere, I think we have more of the plain green ones, though no WubbaNubs.  Nah, let’s just be done with it.  I showed her that it was broken, and told her she couldn’t put it in her mouth anymore.  I said it had to go into the trash, but she insisted she wanted to carry it (“kee-yow“) and I let her.

She carried it around after nap for maybe 20-30 minutes, and each time I saw her start to put it in her mouth, I reminded her that it was broken and she couldn’t do that anymore.  So she kept it tucked under her arm until she agreed to my suggestion that it go in the “tash.”

She did it herself, big girl that she is.  She did ask for it a few more times, and at bedtime when she usually gets it while she sits in the chair for stories.  But we reminded her that it was broken, and she remembered. (“Bo-ken. Tash.“)  Daniel chimed in with a few additional reminders. (“Becca paci bo-ken!“)  I left for a mom’s night out while they were still mid-stories, but M says she went down without a fuss and the monitor is possibly even quieter than usual.

Fingers crossed for a smooth night.  Another baby milestone gone.  Bye bye, pacis.  You were good friends, but your time is now passed.

I’m playing along with Finished for Friday over at Lit and Laundry.  And, well, this week it’s not anything so concrete as a quilt or even an organizational project (hopefully that will be finished for next Friday).  This week, I am proclaiming the end of the 2-to-1 nap transition.  And may we all say, hallelujah!

It’s been a long process.  I remember, way back when, hearing people say that this transition from two naps to one could take several months.  That sounded like nothing less than the third circle of hell.  Months of in-between, mediocre, unpredictable napping?  No thank you!!

But, if I may say so myself, I think we made it through with relative grace and ease.  [And yes, I know that just typing that means that I'm about to get hit with a regression of epic proportions, but oh well.]  It was a combination of good fortune and hitting on a winning strategy, and I feel pretty good about it.

It had to have been around September when our nice, solid routine of two long naps started to go south.  Specifically, both kids were still going down very easily for the morning nap and taking a nice long one, at that.  But when afternoon naptime rolled around, they had no interest.  They were talking to each other, laughing, shrieking, screaming, and otherwise not going down for a nap.  I basically had to use the window between the two naps to run them absolutely ragged, or they’d skip the afternoon entirely and then be completely fried before dinnertime.

I decided I needed a plan.  I consulted Weissbluth, who was of two minds.  One suggestion for the 2-to-1 transition was to gradually move both naps later and later until the afternoon just went away and the morning became sort of a mid-day nap.  This held no appeal to me, whatsoever.  Not only did I not want to have a continually shifting naptime, but my kids were also still quite ready to go down fairly early in the morning.  However, another bit I read that specifically addressed the issue of skipping the afternoon nap, suggested that one potential culprit was a morning nap that was too long.  Aha!

The plan came together.  My overarching goal was that I wanted the morning nap to disappear, but the afternoon nap to remain around 1:00pm, give or take.  I started shortening the morning nap.  I would wake them up no later than 10:30, then 10:15.  It worked pretty well, and they kept that afternoon nap. They started being less in need of the morning nap, and sometimes would talk or just stay awake for the duration, though the 45-60 minutes of quiet time still seemed helpful.

Even better, they started sleeping a bit later in the morning.  The 6AM wake up became 6:30, then 7 and even 7:30. Sometimes I don’t get them out of bed until 8!  It’s delicious.  And the later wake-up meant they were less and less inclined to sleep during the morning nap time and would often skip out entirely.  Once or twice, I even experimented with skipping it entirely, and didn’t completely crash and burn.

It was a little over a week ago that I made the final call.  We would no longer do a morning nap. Prime outing time quickly shifted from late afternoon to mid-morning.  We started a music class and signed up for gymnastics, both before 10AM.  Now, they get up sometime between 7:30 and 8:00, and go down for nap between 12:30 and 1:00.  On a good day, the nap goes longer than two hours (not all days are good…).  I have to be careful to keep them awake in the car, but otherwise (knock on wood) it seems to be going well.  The kids are doing well, the single nap is where I want it to be.  It took a while to get to this point, but it was not the complete chaos I feared it would be from September to January.

Now, when I say this transition is finished…. I’m not a fool.  I know that sleep is one of those things that is never final, never perfect (at least, not for long).  I know we’ll still have bad days (witness: Wednesday), and I know they may hit a nasty regression soon.  But the two-nap chapter is now closed, and at least for now, things are pretty good.  And for that, I am thankful.

Following is copied and pasted directly from an email to a MOT friend of mine. She has been asking me sleep advice, and wants to do CIO with her nearly-6-month-olds but doesn’t have the time to read Ferber (you all know how I feel… read the book!).  I’m no guru, but I’m opinionated.  So, here’s my epic email to her (verbatim, just with added links), with my mish-mash, cliff’s-notes version of Weissbluth and Ferber.  All in what we deemed her “sleep plan.”  Maybe it’ll be useful for someone else out there in the blogosphere.

[Cross-posted at How Do You Do It?]

— — —

Alright, this might be the longest email I’ve ever written.  Sorry.  I just felt like I had to explain things.  Let me know if you have any questions.  And let me just say: this is what worked for me and my kids.  I’m no expert, I’m no doctor. Not all kids are the same, and there’s no one perfect solution that will have your kids sleeping until 8AM every day for the rest of their lives. (ha!) But, overall, this is what worked really well for us.

6:30am (or later, yeah right!): wake up
8:30-9:00: go down for morning nap, depending on how tired they seem or how early they woke up
12noon-1:30pm: go down for mid-day nap, depending on how late AM nap went
3:30-4:30pm: go down for late-afternoon nap, again depending on how mid-day nap went
6:30-7:00pm: start bedtime routine
7:00-7:30pm: lights out

Here’s my philosophy: well-rested kids with a predictable routine are going to sleep better (good sleep begets good sleep), wake up happier, and be generally easier and more receptive to their world than those who are over-tired or unpredictable.  Since that is my starting philosophy, I pretty much think that 95-99% of days should revolve around their sleep schedule.  Yes, sometimes you can play with it. But you won’t know how and when to take that risk until they’ve settled into it. So my advice is to stick like krazy glue to a schedule for at least a week or two and see how it goes before you try fudging things around. It can feel restrictive at first, and some people give you grief for it. But, honestly, I eventually found it sort of freeing, because I knew ahead of time what were good and bad times of day for my kids (more or less) and could plan accordingly.  If you don’t know when your kid is going to nap, how can you know whether or not to sign up for that 3pm class? And it does mean you need to be careful with outings, because you don’t want them falling asleep in the car when you’re on the way home for their nap, and things like that.  Not always super flexible, but it pays off.  And yes, I always did the same thing for both kids at the same time.  One may wake up earlier than the other, but I always put them down at the same time.

Now, for details…

(more…)

The kids have been slowly transitioning off their morning nap for a long time, now.  I think it was around September that I started having to limit the morning nap for the sake of the afternoon.  Since then, they’ve started staying awake longer, and sometimes not actually sleeping at all before I go to get them.  It seems to roughly correspond with what time they get up in the morning.  If it’s before 7:00, then they’ll probably sleep for at least some of that naptime.  If it’s 7:30 or 7:45, then at least one of them will probably stay awake the whole time.  But they really seemed to still need that morning down-time between 9:30 and 10:15, sleep or not.

[Yeah, I'm just going to toss in some random pictures from Chicago, since there are so many I have yet to share.]

Then, there was our crazy travel coming home.  Stayed up way late at the airport, woke up when we landed around midnight and were up until we got home at 2AM.  Slept until 9:00 that morning, and our normal routine was thrown out the window.  One decent nap around 11:00, meals at weird times.  Exhausted and an early bedtime at the stroke of 6.

But then, the next morning (yesterday), they didn’t get up until a mind-boggling 8:30.  They were starting to wake up maybe 45 minutes before that, but would talk for a second and then be quiet for a while, so I didn’t get them until 8:30.  Putting them down in the morning seemed silly, so I just kept them up until about 12:30.  Slept until 3, and stayed up for a normal 6:30-7-ish bedtime.  I figured it would be a fluke, still tired from traveling.

But… this morning… they did it again!  Not a peep until nearly 8, and really pretty quiet until 8:30.  So, I’ll give the one-nap thing a try again.

Don’t get me wrong, I already miss the morning break.  Even if they didn’t sleep, it was a nice break for all three of us.  Hell, it was when I could manage to get in a shower.

But if the trade-off for dropping a nap means they’ll sleep until after 8:00 in the morning?  Holy crap, I’ll take it!  Good deal!  And yes, I know this might just be a passing phase.  But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll last at least a few more days…

[Find out how nearly four weeks of not counting points worked out for me over at the Ladies of Loserville...]

I don’t know if I’m just having a tired day, or if skipping the morning nap actually kicked my ass that much.  And it’s not as though I ever sleep during the kids’ morning nap, but apparently it has been serving a very important recharge function in my life.

We did a trial class at The Little Gym this morning, to see if we want to sign up for the Winter/Spring session.  It’s a pricey place, especially since they only offer a 10% discount on the second kid, so it was nice to be able to do a trial run.  The people were very nice and welcoming, and I think it’s a very cool program.  The trouble was that, because I had a scheduling brain fart, I signed us up for a mid-morning class.  I was thinking ahead to the winter, when I anticipate they will have dropped the morning nap.  Except, well, they haven’t done that yet.

We got in the car extra early, in the hopes they’d either doze off or at least have some quiet time before class.  Mixed results.  Rebecca did fall asleep, Daniel was clearly drowsy but stayed awake.  This led to a cranky Rebecca (in a new place with new people) and a somewhat fragile Daniel.  Ah well.  The problem was, when class was over, it was still only 10:45.  Gah!  What to do!

We played outside, played inside, turned on Sprout for a few minutes.  Had an early lunch, and I got them into their cribs at 12:30, easily 45 minutes earlier than usual.  And instead of 30-45 minutes of talking and shrieking, this time they were silent within minutes, and they slept nearly two hours.

Sounds like a good thing, right?  Then why do I feel like I’ve been hit by a bulldozer?!

I’m sure I’ll get used to my new reality when it happens.  But I’m glad we can keep the morning nap around at least for a little bit longer…  It’s exhausting to keep them entertained from when they wake up until lunchtime!

Yesterday was yet another crap-tastic afternoon nap.  They shrieked and talked to each other for about half an hour before I went up there, only to discover Rebecca needed a diaper change.  They eventually went to sleep, but only stayed that way for maybe 35-45 minutes.  Needless to say, they were not in stellar moods.  That, combined with the muggy heat we’re having, and I decided we were going to the mall.  For what?  No idea.  Just to go.  Well, of course, I ended up buying them a couple of new outfits at Children’s Place (on sale, thank you, the sum total was under $30).  And as we continued to walk around, I saw the Stride Rite, which I had never previously entered.  I thought I’d just take a peek, maybe check out these Robeez that all the cool kids have.  I’m starting to feel a teensy bit guilty that my kids are always barefoot, as I have no interest in searching for lost socks.  And then, the cutest little sandals were on sale…

It’s a good thing they’re too young to notice or care that the result of their bad nap was some seriously cute shoes.  That would probably not be appropriate behavior reinforcement…