Independent Playtime is the same story. I am sticking to my plan though of setting the timer and coming back as soon as it goes off and cleaning up. One day, hopefully soon, she will get it.

Yesterday I couldn’t lay Little Bug down for a nap until 10:45am because we had the alarm system people out doing some work on our alarm system. They had to make the alarm go off multiple times and it wouldn’t have been fair to Little Bug to expect her to sleep through that! She went to sleep at 11:15 and slept for an hour.

I didn’t lay her down until 3:15 for her afternoon nap and she never went to sleep for the 1.5 hours she was in bed.

So, now we’re at 2 naps (this week only) that she has not fallen asleep.

I’m thinking I will continue with laying her down for the two naps at 10 & 2:30 for another week and then make a decision from there as to what we will do about naps.

There are several options:

• Keep the two naps per day until she is consistently not sleeping for one of the naps every single day.
• Do a flip-flop schedule: one day have two naps and the next day only one nap, then the next day do two naps again.
• Go ahead and drop the morning nap completely and move to one afternoon nap after lunch.

If you read the comments that come in to my blog you might have laughed at one of the comments left yesterday from one of my readers. (It made me laugh anyway!) A reader left a comment saying how alike we are in the way that we are such methodical thinkers! She put into words exactly why I am doing what I am doing with Little Bug this week and next to get to the bottom of this napping problem, so I am just going to copy her words right here onto the blog:

I just love how methodical you are about most things. I am the same way and get teased so mercilessly by my husband, friends and family…but hey…if I don’t really pay attention to these patterns then how will I know when it is time for a change? I often get labeled a control freak…but really I just think I am a “need to understand” freak and the only way I know how to do that is to really pay attention to the patterns and learn from the data. I guess that is why I am an analyst in my career. But I really do think it can translate to parenthood. Really setting a routine and then seeing how that routine falls out and making changes accordingly seems so logical to me. I know many parents can just go about it without all our extra analysis and just one day say “oh..this is not working …let us try something new”….Yay for them….but for some of us…we really need to set the experiment up, gather the data…analyze the outcome and then make the change….As long as there are happy, healthy children as a bi-product….who really cares right?

I love how she said some of us need to set the experiment up, gather the data, analyze the outcome and then make the change because that is exactly what I feel I am doing with Little Bug now and I FINALLY feel like I will come up with a solution. I had actually tried the other way she mentioned for the past 2 months and had not been able to come up with a real solution and was only feeling more and more frustrated.

I also love what she says at the end about parents parenting different ways but in the end, as long as parents and children are happy then who cares about the hows. So true!

So, to anyone out there thinking we are “weird” for the way we think about things, leave us alone! (I say that in a teasing-you-back, joking-in-a-loving way!) :) :)

- Elaine