Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
(Henry on the first afternoon of summer vacation. We swam until really late in the afternoon, so I told him no nap today. So he just crawled up on the couch and went to sleep.)
Some of this will not make sense if I don't preface it with this bit of family history...We have a joke in my immediate family that if you're a Brooks (my dad's side)....you don't nap unless all your work is done. If you're a Dawson (my mother's side)....napping IS your work, and that comes first. Work can wait.
For the first six months of both of our boys' lives, they didn't nap well. Then, magically, at six months....they began to nap easily and on a regular schedule. They both took great afternoon naps well into their threes, and I could count on that time to get housework done, finish a lingering Master's degree (ha!), or take a nap myself.
Henry is now 3.5...he will be four at the end of October. Leo happily gave up the nap at this age. Henry is nowhere near interested in giving up the nap. If we do absolutely nothing all day (translation: I let him watch TV), he will not ask for a nap. But if we step foot outside the house or even walk out to the backyard swing, he needs at least three hours of beautyrest in the afternoon to recover. This is a minor annoyance these days b/c Leo is home for the summer, and we'd love to not be hamstrung by Henry's timeframe. But...he starts asking for a nap every afternoon. And if it's slow by 11am or so, he'll start begging at that point. So we need to get him home in the early afternoon, or he'll nap from 4-7. And woe be unto you if you wake him up!
Last week, I had a nasty cold. Henry was fascinated by this b/c I made the mistake of saying I caught a bug. A BUG? Did you catch a bug in your mouth, Mommy? Was it a rolypoly? Was it a spider? What did it do when it got in? After all this questioning, he pondered for quite awhile and finally said...Mommy, you just really need a nap. You will feel all better if you get a nap.
Yep. No worries. The Dawson genes live on.
