I hope you are not tiring of reading about Little Bug’s nap saga. I’m sorry if you are, but I really want a record of how this all went down so I can have a reference for #2.

So, without further ado…

We’ve had two days this week where it’s taken Little Bug 45 minutes to fall asleep for the morning nap. I thought that was a great step in the direction to drop it completely!

Thursday, however, she was asleep within 30 minutes (which is still more than usual), but she fell asleep…so she’s not quite ready to completely drop it yet, I suppose.

After those two days of taking forever to go to sleep (afternoon nap too one one day), I saw two options:

1. Move morning nap time to 11 instead of 10:30.

2. Go ahead and drop the morning nap.

I decided to wait out the rest of the week and see what happens. Little Bug has proven that she can go two days in a row with no morning nap, but she only did okay during those two days.

And okay isn’t good enough, in my opinion, because I know optimal rest means optimal alertness which means optimal learning.

A baby/toddler/child, if well-rested, should not spend their day fussy, whinny and clingy. Those are sure fire signs that that baby/toddler/child is not well-rested. (Of course, there could be other culprits too, such as teething or sickness…) There was a period of time on both Saturday and Sunday where Little Bug was not herself. She was tired. Her little body was missing that morning snooze.

So we aren’t quite ready to make that leap to only one nap yet, I don’t think. We are certainly getting there and making progress towards only having one afternoon nap as these weeks go by.

Friday and Saturday Little Bug napped as usual for two naps. She fell asleep quickly so I guess I won’t move naptime to 11. I’ll keep that as an option though this week if she goes back to not fall asleep until 11am or after. 

While I’m at it I might as well give an update about Independent Play…

We are up to 24 minutes! She is doing pretty well. She may holler out “Mama” once or twice but overall she is pretty happy during IP.

Yesterday when her Daddy put her in her room for IP, he moved the rocking chair in front of her dresser drawers. She had been opening the drawers and I was afraid she would pull the whole dresser down on her so I felt we should block the dresser until we can attach the dresser to the wall.

I had been putting the rocking chair in front of her closet door to keep her out of there.

Well, can you guess what she chose to do during IP that day?

Yep. Dave said when he went in there after the timer went off she had pulled everything out of her closet and was having a good ‘ol time playing! :)

- Elaine