Lately it seems as if the thing to do, despite our generous backyard, despite fatigue I’m feeling from a string of nights of interrupted sleep, is to make sure my toddler has a morning outing. We attend playdates at homes, parks, museums, even a dam turned enormous pretty-blue-wading-pool. He will run, he will obtain mental stimulation from someone else’s toys, he will have extensive morning water play—and if he doesn’t fall asleep on the drive home, he will eat lunch, then go down for a TWO to THREE hour nap. That’s right! That’s the way mama likes it! After the nap, it’s snack time, then we play in the schisle yard and then Dadda takes over and oh yeah! Dinner! More yard! Bath! Bedtime, baby, and bedtime, mama, bedddtiiime (also, if it’s Friday, a glass of wine and chocolate things)!
This is a beautiful schedule. I could live with it for years, years. Or at least until he goes to preschool.
The key phrase in this schedule, however, is: “if he doesn’t fall asleep on the drive home”. This is Sprawl Angeles. There is always a drive. Since we moved to the wilds of the suburbs, there is even more of a journey to playdates and the best parks and any museum and that dam’s wonderful wading pool. And, like most toddlers I know, mine falls asleep—deep, deep asleep— not during the lengthy return trip home, but the second I pull into our driveway.
I lift up his chin with an exuberant sing-song of rhyme—and his chin drops to his chest like a tiny, beautiful potato to earth. I extract his sack-doll body from the carseat while talking in an ear-infesting falsetto, utilizing key words like, FOOD MMMM and CHEESE and, the ace, ELMO. If nothing wakes him, not even the banging of the front door as I haul the enormous toddler inside, my fatigue blooms and I deposit him in his crib, then lunge for my bed, knowing this will not be The Nap, that there will be no The Nap today, but two scant 1 hour breathers, the next breather not for another 3 or 4 hours. This schedule, this continuation of broken sleep schedule, this schedule I’d prefer not to live with—ever. I sometimes debate not driving him anywhere in the morning in order to keep him on the schedule I prefer, so that I may get in as much of a heavenly chunk of TWO to THREE hour napping as he does and be Refreshed Mother when we hit the sandbox later in the day.
And then I feel guilty. Because it’s not about me and my fatigue. Or not enough, in my own personal mother-situation, about me and my fatigue to thwart his dam-wading experience or button-pushing joy at the museum or sand castle building waaaaaay over thar at distant-country Zuma Beach or, on truly adventurous days, Santa Barbara. And I dredge energy reserves I always forget I possess and I tell myself not to be afraid, that I can do this—it’s not like I have triplets, or a baby and a dog, or a baby and a farm, or multiple babies, a reality show and a promiscuous ex-husband—I can do this.
And then: I do it.
Looks like so much fun.
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