Sweep Stakes

No nap time has changed everything.

One of the major headaches at Anonybabe's daycare has been their insistence on nap time. Completely reasonable to expect all 2 year olds to take afternoon naps, right? But we'd phased naps out at home months before Anonybabe started daycare, in the hopes she'd go to bed at a decent hour. When we were told the children at the daycare took afternoon naps, we shrugged and said, "OK" to them, figuring Anonybabe wouldn't take a shine to it, but it couldn't hurt.

Well, it didn't hurt her, but it was certainly a pain in the butt for everyone else: Anonybabe would babble loudly while the other children were trying to fall asleep, then drop off just as they were waking up. Since the daycare provider would let the kids sleep until they woke up, Anonybabe would snooze for hours, until we came to pick her up, and then wouldn't go to sleep until past midnight. It was awful. I couldn't imagine that the daycare provider would let Anonybabe skip nap time altogether, but I asked them not to let her sleep too long, then told her insipidly that I didn't mind if Anonybabe didn't sleep. That didn't seem to translate.

Finally, recently, Anonyhub told the owner point blank that nap time was detonating our schedule, and that Anonybabe just couldn't take afternoon naps or we'd have to go somewhere else. I think/hope this was presented as the facts, not a threat. In any case, the owner told us that they'd be happy to bypass nap time, they wanted to be flexible.

Lo and behold, everything has seemed to magically change for the better now that nap time is done. When Anonyhub or I pick Anonybabe up in the afternoons her face isn't stained with dried tear tracks and snot. She gives us a big hug and then insists on staying longer to play. In the morning when we tell her it's a daycare day, she smiles rather than pouts. When we get home from daycare, she eats dinner, she plays with us, she goes dutifully to bed and falls asleep around 8:30-9pm. Then she wakes up on her own, ready to eat breakfast, get dressed, and start a new day. No more prying her, protesting, out of her bed in the morning and at the last minute because she went to bed so late the night before.

And here's the kicker: part of why my feelings were so hurt when the daycare suggested physical therapy for Anonybabe was that it seemed like a another in a long list of suggestions on how to help make our daughter better. I thought her teachers were getting all of Anonybabe's effervescent energy and then choosing to ignore it and focus on the things she wasn't doing. At the same time we were getting alarming reports that sometimes make me think the teachers at the school don't know Anonybabe at all. (Ex: "She finally learned the words to the blessing song yesterday!" ?? She's been singing it non-stop at home for a month. "We learned a letter yesterday!" Anonybabe knew her letters before she started school there, etc, etc).

Now that nap time is over, instead of getting alarming reports that make me think the teachers don't know my daughter at all, I've been getting reports that sound more like our little girl. Igor - Igor who has driven me crazy with her brusqueness - has been spending one-on-one time with Anonybabe while the other children nap and now tells me all the little stories I've been expecting to hear at pick up time all along. "She makes up a story with the crayons at the table" says Igor, and bounces her finger around as if it were the yellow baby crayon, the blue daddy crayon, the red mama crayon. She tells me how smart Anonybabe is. How funny. Igor's eyes have started to light up when Anonybabe comes in in the mornings. These are the good reports that have started to trickle in with the carefully worded bad ones.

They tell me that Anonybabe is engaging and animated while all the children are asleep, and then as soon as they wake up, she becomes silent again. That's a little heartbreaking, but not as heartbreaking as knowing that she was a silent little zombie all the time for six months, that the daycare providers weren't seeing her be herself at all. Ever. Turns out Anonybabe wasn't giving them anything positive to ignore. She'd just been sitting in a corner and watching everyone else dance and play around her. That's unsettling in and of itself, and a major breakdown in communication on our part and the teacher's. But who knew the way to untie the Gordian knot of miscommunication was to take away Anonybabe's nap time?

I'm humbled knowing that this thing I never would have asked for on my own - the abolition of nap time for just my little girl - has made things infinitely better.