To Nap or Not To Nap

Sometimes it feels like my wife is wishing my son's nap away. She constantly reminds me that it won't last forever, and "wouldn't it be better if he slept through the night instead?"

I'm no fool. If his sister is anything to go by, I have maybe six more months of naps from him before he no longer needs it. But that nap time is fast becoming my favorite time of the day. It's almost irrelevant if he sleeps through the night anyway. I never do.

People say I'm lucky that he still naps for at least three hours a day. But put it this way - if he didn't, we would be living in a rat-infested hell hole with no food in the fridge and I would be wearing dirty pauper's rags as clothes. Not because I spend the time when he's asleep cleaning, shopping, cooking and doing laundry. Far from it.

When he closes his eyes at about 1:30 every afternoon, I do what I have to do. This is often:

Watch SportsCenter
Watch Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law (thank you, DVR)
Watch the Yanks in a day game
Write
Check out hot photos of Natalie Portman, Julia Louis Dreyfus and Sarah Silverman
Play card games with daughter
Play Wii with daughter
Eat a big sandwich

But it is because I spend his naptime doing this self-pampering stuff that I can spend time during the time when he's awake:

Cleaning the kitchen (twice a day - upon waking, then after dinner)
Carrying dirty clothes down to the basement, bringing clean ones up, folding them, putting them away
Shopping
Reminding my son he needs to go potty (to avoid making more dirty clothes)
Read (Madeline books and anything with big trucks in)
Pouring Cheerios into bowls
Making a big sandwich

The day his nap dries up will mean a whole new outlook on my day. And I'm not looking forward to it.