Free From the Bonds of a Nap Time Regiment

Last week not only marked the first week of Spring but also the first week of being a single-nap household.

At first we were terrified.

How was I supposed to regain my sanity if there’s only one nap in a day? Where would all my free time go? How on earth am I going to entertain this child for such lengthy amounts of time?

We consulted what we believe to be our holy bible of sleep information, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber. He said, “although the second nap may be dropped, total sleep time generally does not change: either the remaining nap or the sleep time lengthens.” This put us at ease and we decided over the weekend that Monday was the time to start this single-nap routine.

Boy am I glad we did. Gone are the days of being chained to the insanity that is an infant’s daily sleep schedule. Our days before were lived in three-hour increments between the hours of 7-10am and 1-3pm. If given a choice I would undoubtedly choose to be at home at naptime over most social activities.

Not last week, mind you. It’s finally time to get back into the world and live among other fellow human beings. This is something that’s been missing since the day I got laid off and became a slave to the naptime regiment. Our daily calendar is now full of fun things that would typically happen in the middle of a nap  back when we were doubling them up. We went to Scheels, joined the MOMS club at the Mall, played at the park, ran around at the Summit and finally got to go to the toddler story time at the library.

Without a doubt this is the most we’ve been out of the house in the past year.

Look out world, we’re coming out from under the naptime rock and damn does it feel good.