It seems pretty typical to spend a lot of energy helping your baby to fall asleep, but what about trying to keep them awake? I’ve been finding myself in this position a lot lately, and I keep wondering if I’m torturing the poor girl.
There is a reason I try to keep Lucy awake: if she takes a tiny nap, then she later has a hard time falling asleep for her bigger nap. Since I’ve added a pre-nap feeding to her day (to keep up milk production and boost her calories), she has been happily eating all that she wants, but also sometimes indulging in a snooze at the same time — cozy, but not very good eating _or_ sleeping. So I find myself jiggling, poking, coughing, and saying, “Hey baby, no sleeping!” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes we have a nap rebellion afterwards.
The weirdest experience in this category occurred a couple of weeks ago, when I was trying to prevent Lucy from falling asleep in the car. We had just left a baby shower for Janice & Matt, and Lucy was due for a serious nap in just a half hour. I knew that if she fell asleep in the fifteen-minute car ride home, she wouldn’t get anything like her full forty winks. So, I got in the back seat with her (don’t worry: Jon was driving), and I kept poking her all the way home. There was a certain amount of hollering from Lucy (and speeding from Jon), but we did get home awake and then successfully settled in for a good long nap.
Every time I work to keep her awake, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. But seeing her little sleep-refreshed face after a big nap reminds me that this girl really does like a good, long snooze. Don’t we all!
I once got a speeding ticket while racing home for a nap. That nap was NOT worth $110!
Abi fell asleep in the car all the time and wouldn’t transfer well to the house, so I let her sleep in the car while I did other stuff. Sometimes I brought out a book or knitting and sat with her. Sometimes I checked on her every few minutes while I got some chores done in the house. I helped that we park our truck literally 3 feet from our side door.
Aren’t the naps so bizarre? You love them and you hate them.
Ah yes! I remember the “Daniel Wake Up” Song!
You hold the sleepy baby under the armpits and hop him lightly back and forth across your lap like a tiny typewriter, singing, “Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup!”
Didn’t really work, though, but it was fun to do!
When Benjamin dropped his morning nap, his afternoon nap for a while began around 11am. This was also around the time we got done with church, so all the way home (which is seriously only 5 minutes), we would poke him, talk to him, try to get him to play, etc. so he wouldn’t fall asleep (can you believe that falling asleep for 5 minutes in the car can screw up the nap…).
Anyway – happily he has now moved the nap to 12:30, so he stays awake just fine.
Before he dropped his morning nap, he would try and stretch it way out and then not take his afternoon nap and mess up the rest of the day, so I started waking him up from his morning nap after a set time. I gotta tell you – it is the strangest thing that you can fight with them for so long to establish good naps and then you get to a point where you actually have to wake the sleeping baby…
All this talk of naps is very reassuring – Gabriel is apparently working on dropping one of his two naps now… and it is just so confusing and frazzles me to no end. I too ann feel conflicted at times about either trying to keep him up or get him down when he seems to want/need(?) the other so badly. Poke on!
Well Allison – I can tell you from my very recent experience (Benjamin dropped his AM nap about three weeks ago) that it’s not a very fun experience! The thing we found the most helpful was moving his bedtime an hour to an hour and a half earlier to make up for missed sleep during the day (he dropped the morning nap, but didn’t lengthen the afternoon nap at all until just recently).