one small corner of the universe

I am writing to you from the protected silence of Naptime, which, in this house, only lasts for 30 minutes at at time and only happens a maximum of 3 times a day. If you’re doing the math, that means I have about an hour and a half to myself every day. Not that I’m complaining. For one thing, she goes to bed at 10, gets up for a bottle at 7 or 7:30, and goes back to sleep until 9 or 10. And also, I love that she is happy and awake during the day. She’s a little nut, a real riot, and every day brings something new. I would rather be with her than do anything else. Which should be obvious to readers of my neglected blog.

But see, I like Naptime. I like those few minutes of alone time during the day. And even with the 12 hours of sleep she gets, the girl NEEDS her naps. She does cranky like a coffee addict who’s stuck drinking decaf–pulls her own hair, grunts at people, throws things. I’ve mentioned before that she fights daytime sleep–she always has, even when she was a tiny screaming force of nature–and so sometimes I have to fight her to get her to nap. She’s quite transparent, so I always know when Naptime is nigh, so I put her in the crib, give her a pacifier and her Wee Hairy Beastie, and turn on her classical music CD, and then I kiss her and tell her to have a nice nap. If I am a few minutes too late or a few minutes too early reading the sleepy signs, she will stiffen, kick the sides of the crib, and eventually press her face into the bars and scream what can only be obscene things in my direction. If I catch the sleepy signs at the right moment, she will welcome the pacifier, pull her legs up under her butt, and put the Wee Hairy Beastie over her face and go right to sleep.

But sometimes, people, sometimes even if the conditions are perfect and she’s just the right amount of sleepy, even if she can hardly muster the energy to hold her eyelids up, she will still fight, kick, scream, and wail, much like Paris Hilton did during her own initial incarceration. Which is why today, just moments before I sat down at this computer to compose this very post, I put the Wee Hairy Beastie over my own child’s face. She was asleep before I could get out of the room.