the afternoon nap

i have a confession. i am the most unsympathetic mom when it comes to getting grace to take her afternoon naps. there is no mercy... unless of course, she falls down and bonks her head on the crib... then i feel just plain terrible and swoop her up and make her giggle till kingdom come.

for grace and i, the afternoon nap is the greatest challenge, and usually involves an hour plus of back/forth tug of war style sleep attempts. it goes like this. grace rubs her eyes, yawns, and is clearly tired. clearly. so, i do what i should do: i fix her a nice warm bottle, check the diaper (because no baby likes to sleep in poop), and lay her down. her lovey, a giraffe, snuggles up by her head - and she gets covered with a blankie. this is routine. we start naptime (even bedtime) with this. always. it's how it goes.

she proceeds to drink some bottle, but then rolls off, stands up, and starts babbling. basically, she decides she doesn't want to sleep. i wait about ten minutes, (sometimes i just ignore her completely) and if she hasn't laid down, i put her back down. try, try again.

and it goes for an hour.

this is probably my least favorite part of parenthood. the afternoon nap battle. to me, this is worst than getting my nipples bitten when her little teeth first came in (OUCH).

let me tell you, once the baby can stand up in the crib, naps become a challenge. whatever happened to my little baby who couldn't even roll? i miss those days... when sleep was basically all day... easy, breezy, beautiful (like covergirl!)

now i get to deal with my daughter and her cheeky grin that says "hi mom, you can't make me sleep."

new mommies be warned!

so that's my story. we're in this middle of this session now. we started at 1:50. it's been an hour and i see no signs of her relenting.

argh!