Owed a Nap

I do a lot for my kids, and it seems to me that the least they could do for me in return – and I don’t expect much of anything at all – is to take a nap when I’m home alone with them.

As I write this, Lucy, Isaac and I are home for day care’s short “spring break” – just one lone April Friday. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a while. After all, it’s not often that I’m home alone on a weekday with one or both kids unless they are sick. Thankfully, and knocking on wood as I write this, they are healthy and happy.

Everyone is behaving well and we had a fun morning of grocery shopping – hooray for two-seater carts at the Hunt Valley Wegmans - and playing at the park. Isaac  took a two-hour nap when we got home and Lucy and I hung out in the meantime, eating lunch and gearing up for our own naps, or so I thought at the time.

But now here we are at 3:30 p.m., and everyone is awake. Lucy sat on her bed for an hour from 1 to 2 p.m., playing quietly with her baby dolls and reading her books, but when I went upstairs to change Ike’s diaper and I walked by her room, it was clear that she was wide awake and nowhere near ready to fall asleep. She’d been “trying” for an hour and it didn’t happen, I thought, so I guess I should liberate her. But this foiled my big plan – the idea was that while Lucy took her nap, Isaac would be ready for his second nap, and when they both were asleep, I would curl up on the couch myself.

But alas, it was not to be. The fleece blanket is flopped on the couch without me. So we are all downstairs, and I’m the only one who would really like to fall asleep. Isaac can sure make a mess of a room, dumping out toy bins and baskets from all corners of the living room and moving furniture (how did the end table get over there all by itself?) even though he can’t yet crawl. Lucy is glued to her second episode of “Yo Gabba Gabba” – I held off for as long as I could on letting her watch TV, but at this point in the day, I need her to watch TV, if you know what I mean.

I’m still happy to be home with them, watching all the silly things they are doing, but I’m tired. The nap, even a short one, had been part of my carefully crafted and not at all lofty plan for the day. The general outline for the day was to leave the house for a little while (done), keep everyone happy (done) and catch a little decadent shut-eye/me time. I guess I can’t really complain about achieving two out of three.

Now I have to go – time to cue up the third episode of “Yo Gabba Gabba.”