the chronicles of napnia

Here's the deal-- I feel like a ridiculous excuse for a parent some days. (Okay, lots of days.) I mean, honestly, Red is only 18 months older than Pudge, and they are my second and third rounds at this whole mothering thing, but I keep finding myself in developmental situations with Pudge where I simply cannot remember what I did with the other two. Take for instance, the whole nap issue. Let me preface this whole thing by saying, I LOVE naptime. Naptime is the time to write lists, organize thoughts, attempt to check email (a new computer that reliably worked would be INCREDIBLE), write inane blog posts, fold laundry, prep dinner supplies, wash floors, have a phone conversation without the background noise of piercing screams... you get the picture. Now mind you, I'm thrilled if I even get one or two of those things done during one naptime, but I consider it a success even if it's small-scale.

I'm also a big fan of routine. (surprise, surprise) I understood that I needed to relax my need for consistency while Pudge was really young, but once he started being predictable with his napping needs, we went to a pretty typical morning schedule: he'd nap from about 9:30 am to 10:30/11:00. Then he'd nap again from around 1-3 pm, at the same time as Red. That was AWESOME. During the morning, Red and I could have some one on one time, and while they both napped, I could attack The List. Good times were had by all.

Then. A month or so ago, Pudge began changing things up a bit on me. While he still went down for his morning nap like a champ, by the time the afternoon naptime rolled around, it was par-tay time in his head. And the funny thing about this kid is that, for the most part, he's not terribly upset by being alone in his crib. So, I'd put him down around the same time, maybe pushing it by 15-20 minutes or so, but he'd just hang out in his crib for a looooong time without falling asleep. He'd whine a bit every once in a while, but mostly he'd just babble away, or he'd have significant periods of quiet, in which I'd think he had given up and fallen asleep only to break the silence with a major giggle and bust my dream. It made it really difficult for me to get anything done when I'm downstairs straining to hear every peep over the baby monitor-- I felt like I couldn't get started with anything until I knew they were both asleep. It was beginning to play out that by the time he eventually fell asleep, Red was bounding down the stairs, ready to begin the afternoon. I was left with:

*things not getting done (a big-time downer for me)
*heavy doses of guilt that Pudge was spending too much time alone in his crib
*major grumpiness at my lack of any time to even pee without a two-and-under-audience-member
*uncertainty about what the heck to do!

So, I weighed my options (benedryl getting crossed off that list pretty quickly...), and figured my best bet would be to dump the morning nap. Over the holidays, we were away for several days with relatives, and there were times that we went out and his regularly-scheduled-naptime was disturbed anyway, so it seemed like it was the perfect time to take the plunge when we got back home, and our normal life began once again. It's been almost a full week of the one-nap-a-day thing, and there have been some highs and lows, but I'm still just not sure if I'm doing the best thing, you know? The morning is nice in that we're not chained to the house for naptime, but then again, it's been bitterly cold lately, so it's not like we've been heading out for extended periods of time or anything. But then I have this nagging feeling that in this schedule, he's just not going to get the amount of daytime sleep that he really needs, which I think is about 3 hours... and yes, I still (mostly) scan those your-child-this-week emails, so I'm very easily influenced by the (often conflicting) advice of the 'experts.' But on another hand (how many are we at now?), the kids all also start swim classes tomorrow, and the group for Pudge only meets at 10:30 am, so he'd be missing that naptime anyway if we were still on the old schedule. I'm also not the kind of person who can easily go from one routine to another on different days, so maybe I'm just projecting that onto Pudge, and he could handle going between morning-nap-on-days and morning-nap-off-days. Am I making any fricking sense anymore with all this going back and forth?

That's where I'm at. I'm probably going to just stick it out with the path I've struck here, regardless of all my internal vacillating (that is simply the way my crazy brain works, no denying that). Soon enough, the cold weather will be past us, and we'll take up our morning treks again, and then we'll be occupied enough that the morning nap question will be mostly moot (or moo, if you're Joey Tribiani).

That being said (that I'm a stubborn, anxious, and resistant-to-change kind of gal), I'm still curious to know how and when other people handled the transition to one nap deal. What's your story?