Nap Time Battles

Jayden has always been my good sleeper. He started sleeping through the night at 5 weeks old!! He never threw a fit when it was time for his nap, he always laid down and went right to sleep.... until he was about 14 months old.

He learned that he could protest his naps and not have to sleep... (unfortunately there is no way to FORCE your child to sleep).. At this point in time Jayden wasn't able to climb out of his crib and I was very thankful for that. However, he would still jump around and not sleep. Most days he would eventually give in and go to sleep.

A few months ago Jayden discovered he could climb out of his crib. I was in the shower one Sunday morning and Jordan was still in bed (trying to get 5 more minutes of sleep), when I heard fast, little footsteps quickly approaching the bathroom door. The next thing I heard was the bathroom door open and "BOO!" I wrapped my towel around me and walked out of the bathroom and saw Jordan still sound asleep in our bed. After asking his several times if he was the one who got Jayden out of bed and Jordan saying, "no." I couldn't believe it! Our son could now escape his cage, uh I mean crib! :)

He didn't show off his new trick everyday.. in fact it wasn't very often he used it to his advantage... but when he realized it was a great way to avoid taking a nap, I started losing my mind!

I have found him squirting lotion all over his body, floor, blankets... I've found him pulling his baby wipes out one by one making huge piles all over his room... I once found him in our bedroom pulling all the nozzles off my perfume bottles!

And then the most recent finding- he learned to climb up onto his changing table and get the baby powder. Jayden LOVES baby powder, every time he gets his diaper changed he requests baby powder on his hiney. On this particular day I had forgotten to take the baby powder, lotion and wipes out of his room because I needed to make a very important phone call. While I was on the phone I noticed Jayden was being VERY quiet and I remembered I had left the wipes in his room. As soon as my 15 minute phone call was over I ran upstairs and all I could smell was baby powder!!!! I flung open Jayden's door to find a fog of powder... after the fog cleared I could see the all the damage he had done in those 15 minutes. Everything in his room was dusted with baby powder. It was almost impossible to breathe! I knew I would one day appreciate this memory in photo form so I ran down stairs, grabbed the camera and the phone and called Jordan. While I was on the phone with him I was snapping pictures of our son covered from head to toe in baby powder.

It took forever to clean up this mess. I used the shop vac so I wouldn't ruin our house vacuum and the stupid thing kept shocking me because of all the powder and static in his changing pad cover. It took like 7 hours to air out his room so you could actually breathe and of course I threw everything in the wash because there was no other way to get it clean.

Instead of nap time we have "quiet time". Jayden is allowed to play with a quiet toy (magna doodle drawing thing) and read books or look at a picture book my mom made for him. Since implementing quiet time I've found Jayden sleeping 3 or 4 times!

It's a rough transition for all of us right now because Jayden gets really grouchy the closer bed time gets, but I'm still happy with having an hour of alone time to get my stuff done!