This whole concept of children needing to sleep during the day is still hard for me. I’ve never been one to take naps. In my mind, I need to spend every waking hour of sunlight Getting Shit Done (TM), not lounging around on the couch. Once I grew enough hair on my chest to handle strong coffee, it solved any issues my no sleeping during the day policy caused by clashing with the fact that until just recently, I still liked to stay up until 2 AM fiddling with the stylesheet on my blog or reformatting my to-do list for the 400th time. Feeling groggy the next day? Nothing my friend Server #2 can’t fix.

Part of this resistance to naps is that I knew once I started working in the real world, it wouldn’t be an option anymore. But I haven’t taken advantage of my newfound freedom to catch a few Z’s during the day now either, because now when I get any kind of break from Carter, that urge to Get Shit Done (TM) is even stronger. I don’t dare waste a spare minute of downtime now, for fear I’ll never be able to finish a book or read the newspaper again. I was talking to someone just this week about how much more ruthless with your time you become when you’re a parent, knowing that any free second could be the last chance you have to do anything for hours. I’ve heard many people suggest taking a nap yourself when your kids do, but that’s just out of the question for me. I have important things like blogging and reading Gizmodo to do.

All of my resistance to napping makes me a little insensitive to the profound effect that it has on Carter. A few minutes of good sleep at the right time during the day for him can mean the difference between being the perfect child or acting like a wet cat trapped in a burlap sack. I respect the power of the nap, but I’m still too stubborn to believe that I can’t bend Carter’s sleeping patterns to fit my schedule.

For the past year he’d been on a pretty standard two nap a day schedule, one morning and one afternoon. This was nice. I could count on maybe doing the bills or reading the news during my break in the morning, then having another break around 3 to finish up some chores and work on my thesis. This worked well because I could even fill a big part of his waking time with meals, and in the middle of the day, a walk outside with Bootsy. I’d gotten as dependent on this schedule as he was: any interruptions or breaks in that routine and I’d start acting like the wet cat along with Carter.

Now he’s reaching an age where two naps a day is a little too much, but one just isn’t enough. The little guide sheet that the doctor gave me at his 18-month checkup calls this an “awkward” time, the first of many I’m sure, in this case awkward meaning he likes to bite and slap me in the face when he’s not sleeping too. I had been doing okay with the one nap thing myself; I’ve recently started getting up at the crack of dawn before he does so I can work on my thesis, so the pressure to use nap time for work was less. Carter was still sleeping in the morning, then we’d have the whole afternoon to play. Plus he still sleeps great at night, so it was a good arrangement.

The afternoons/evenings did seem long though. After 7-8 hours nonstop of digging Little People out from under the couch, I’d start to reconsider my strict no-nap policy. Someone suggested I try to flip Carter’s nap time to the afternoon so it would break up my day, the idea being that if I kept him up through the morning he’d be even more tired and sleep longer too. The first day we tried this, he melted down at 11 and I just gave in. The second day, he refused to sleep at all, so I took him with me in the car to run errands. He finally fell asleep when we were two blocks from home, so I got on the freeway and kept driving all the way to Oak Brook and back so he could get a decent nap. Finally, on the third day, I kept him up in the morning by playing at the park and he slept three hours in the afternoon. The catch was that after being at the park all morning in the heat, I really needed a nap too. And this time I took it. I give up. The kid sleeps when he wants to, at least until we get him de-clawed.