Helen doesn’t like to take naps. Sometimes, if she’s really tired (every 2-3 days), she’ll submit and fall asleep. And on those days, she sleeps for several hours and wakes up all sweaty and disoriented.
But most days it’s a battle to keep her in her room for an hour. We have a CD that plays restful music for 40 minutes, and we play it every night when she goes to sleep and every afternoon at naptime. She doesn’t HAVE to have it, but she likes it. So we play it.
Today, she wanted to come upstairs as soon as the CD was over. So she started trying to climb the babygate that blocks the stairs, and lost her balance, falling on her butt. At this point, she started to SCREAM (this is day three of nap strike — she MUST TAKE A NAP today), which started a chain reaction. The other child started to scream, having been rudely awakened from HER nap.
I took Helen back into her room, started the CD again, nestled her down in her bed, and tried to get her to settle down. She was in hysterics. Got her Blue’s Clues sleeping bag up on the bed (which is what she seemed to want). NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! She wanted the sleeping bag on the FLOOOOOOOOOOOOR!!!
Now she’s on the floor in her Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, with strict instructions not to come back out of her room until the CD is over again. Which will be in about 10 minutes.
And we have a birthday party to go to in 40 minutes. We’ll see if Helen sleeps through it.