It’s Been Four Long Days

It’s been four days of no naps around here. No naps for Ellie. No naps for me. Four. Long. Days.

And I really need my naps. I keep wondering why I feel so tired and behind, and then I remember. Oh yeah. No naps.

One day I tried to lie down and rest a little. Ellie crawled onto the bed and started crying and saying, “Momma! Wake up! Wake up!” It was a little like that scene from Steel Magnolias, but without the tragedy.

It did make me cry though.

We’ve had a lot of crying these past four days, too.

Because of the no naps. That, and because Ellie got a real, honest-to-goodness, band-aid requiring boo-boo last week. Her finger go pinched in the elevator door. Sometimes she remembers her now completely healed boo-boo and will come to me holding her finger out. And crying. I give her a hug, and she tucks her little knees in and asks me to sing “Hush Little Baby”. It was sweet, the first 50 times.

Ellie isn’t napping because I took the final step in her weaning process and stopped letting her nurse before nap time. Actually, it wasn’t just a “nurse before nap time”. We would nurse lying down, and then once Ellie was asleep I would slip away from her and let her keep napping.

I think this is going to be a tough one.

On the plus side, Ellie has been sleeping a little longer at night. More like 11-12 hours instead of her usual 10. Before, she slept at night from 8pm to 6am, and then took a 1-2 hour nap just after lunch.

This past week she’s been getting up later, around 7 or 8 in the morning. But no naps. I think maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad trade-off, the 8am versus 6am wake-up call without any nap.

Except for the crying. So much crying. And the holding. She always wants to be held, or carried. And Ellie is no lightweight.

So this has left me feeling a little, um, crazy.

I’ve been trying to do a mini version of our bedtime routing, some books and singing and then lie down in her crib. It works at night. It doesn’t seem to work during the day. Sobbing. Hysterical sobbing. Until we finally decide nap time is, yet again, a wash.

Today she seemed so exhausted that I finally decided to hold her and sing and rock her a little. She fell asleep in less than 5 minutes. I let her sleep on me for a little while, it reminded me of when she was a tiny baby, but when I tried to lay her down on my bed she woke right up. Crying. (By the way, too much of the holding while sleeping when she was tiny is one of the reasons I think we’re having our current troubles.)

I might try taking walks in the stroller after lunch. Ellie could probably sleep for a little in the stroller.

Of course it’s not a real solution. She still wouldn’t be sleeping in her bed. And, more importantly (?), I wouldn’t be sleeping.

Is 15 minutes too much to ask?