Too late for a nap…
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor
Once a week, we keep my grandson overnight. It both gives his mom and dad a little break and let’s us spend some time with the little guy (who is 13 months old now).
He’s at the age now where he’s pretty active and usually around noonish, he crashes and needs a lilttle nappy-nap. A nap of about an hour-and-a-half to two hours and he’s usually good to go for the rest of the afternoon, going to bed for the night around 8 o’clock… usually.
For whatever reason, he did not take much of a nap yesterday, so around 5:30 or so, he was exhausted. Now, left to my own devices, I would have just let him take a nap. But my wife, his beloved Granna, said it was “too late for a nap.” I was shook…
In my mind it is never either too early or too late for a nap. If you need a nap, it is, by very definition, “nap time.”
See VIEWPOINT, page A6 VIEWPOINT
From page A4
But I usually defer to my wife’s wishes, so we did our best to keep him up and engaged with things like Wiggle & Learn videos and a nice bubble bath, but he was absolutely done by around 7 p.m. and basically passed out. So, he was out… for a while.
Around 9:30, my wife was getting ready for bed when she heard the distict sounds of a bany not being asleep. Sure enough, he had basically taken his afternoon nap at 7 o’clock, and now it was prime time! There’s something about babies that that somehow seem to know when they’re getting away with something. He didn’t just want to be awake — he wanted to play! Now I always joke that my wife hits a wall at night where she “turns back into a pumpkin” like Cinderella’s carraige at midnight, she she was definitely about to hit it, so I volunteered to keep an eye on the little guy.
“Don’t let him stay up too late,” she cautioned me, but when Granna goes to sleep, Pop-Pop makes the rules (don’t tell my wife). Besides, he’s a baby. It’s not like he has to get up for work in the morning. So we watched some Wiggles on my phone, had a snack and rolleed around on the living room floor playing with his bouncy balls. After an hour, he started doing his tell-tale eye-rubbing so I gave his blankie and put him back to bed.
It’s never too late for a nap…
