Power Naps

My child doesn’t do naps very well ever since she was a few days old. To date, she still does not take to her day-time naps well. When she does, it is usually not without a battle. (And she does a mean battle when she tries to fight off sleep which happens every single time when we try to get her to nap)

Spud is just a horrid, horrid day-time napper. So horrid that we could easily spend the entire day trying to get her to nap, only to have her power nap for a grand total of 10 friggin’ minutes! Sometimes, it is the only nap she’ll have in. the. entire. day.

Ten minutes. That's a whole mega 10 minutes is all it takes for this little imp to keep going for another 3 hours before another "get-Spud-to-sleep battle" starts again.

It is tiring to try to get her to sleep. I mean, just imagine this: we spend hours trying every single trick in the book to just get her to nap, and when she finally did get some shut-eye, we barely had our asses on the couch to finish our much needed glass of water! I don’t know how many times we ran out of steam from sheer exhaustion just trying to put her down, and I swear we are the ones ready to conk out anytime while trying to get her to nap in the day.

It is hard having a child that does not take to naps when she really needs to. She gets moody, cranky and fusses a lot, and trust me, it’s not like we want it to be that way as it takes a toll on us, too. That being said, I can’t help but get super annoyed when random strangers who start cooing at Spud started commenting that she should be sleeping as she looks so tired. They would then continue to point it out to me and/or Silver Bullet in a teasing manner, but talking to Spud in a baby-talk way that her parents should let her sleep. I swear I want to slap these people purple sometimes. I mean, we know she is tired, we can see that she is spent, and we know she needs to sleep and god knows we try to get her to sleep! We cannot agree more that Spud needs to sleep but on most days, Spud just doesn’t want to no matter how hard we try. Hence, we can only try, and try and try till she gives up fighting. So seriously, back off and give us a break on this.

I have been googling and wondering for a long time now on not only how we can get Spud to shut those eye-lids without having to move heaven and earth, but also how to make her sleep longer. We have been trying for close to six months now, but almost every attempt had seemed futile…It is so bad that she has eye-bags!

For now, we have resigned our fate to the fact that our child just doesn’t nap as much other babies or as much as a baby should. There have been days where she did nap for up to an hour, but those days (from our record) were really random, and far and between. For some reason, Spud seems to have something against day-time nap – it is as if she is so afraid she’ll be missing out on things if she takes a little nap.

These days, we’d be lucky if she does a 15-minuter at a stretch!