Naptime

When Rose came home, I committed to writing every Wednesday. If you look back over the last few weeks, you can see I've fallen off the wagon.

I blame naptime. My naptime.

As many of you know, I'm an up before dawn kind of girl. And in the summer, after I've gotten everyone up and dressed and off to camp and swim team and dance, and then fed them all lunch, I'm fried. And I know that I'll probably have 10 more hours of this parenting thing before they're all asleep in bed. So when Rose goes down for a nap, I threaten all of the big kids within an inch of their lives and take at least 30 minutes for myself. On a good day, I'll actually get a little sleep myself, but this is always chancy-- invariably the phone rings or someone texts me even if the kids are leaving me alone. But I always get some reading time in. Today, for example, I read at least two pages of my book before I dozed off, and I slept for at least ten before the phone rang. That's pretty typical for my quiet time-- it's usually underwhelming. But disappointing or not, I guard it fiercely-- it's often the only time of day when someone isn't hanging on me, begging for (another) glass of chocolate milk.

So blogging has fallen by the wayside in favor of naptime.

Want to know what else has fallen by the wayside?

Rose's beautiful sleep habits.

When Rose came home four months ago, we were amazed at how well she slept. We put her in her crib, and within seconds her finger was in her mouth, and minutes later she was sound asleep. We joked (probably tastelessly) that we wished all of our kids could have been sleep trained in an orphanage. There was none of the standing in the crib and wailing that my other one-year-olds pulled. None of the hours spent outside the bedroom door, willing them to lie down and just fall asleep.

Rose is comfortable with us now. She seems to be attaching beautifully. She's also catching up on all of her developmental milestones-- crawling around the house and, yesterday, taking a single tentative step. She likes nothing better than holding on to someone's hand and doing her adorable little Frankenstein walk around the house.

Comfort and attachment are all good. The loss of the institutional behaviors is exactly what we want to see happening. She's starting to look more and more like a healthy, well-adjusted, fifteen-month-old.

And I guess I should have predicted this, but she's sleeping more and more like my other kids too-- waking up at night, demanding to sleep with me, refusing to go to bed unless I sit with her.

I'm so tired. Naptime is even more of a sacred time of day than it was before this phase (oh, please tell me it's just a phase) started.

One-year-olds are exhausting. Four kids home from school for the summer, also exhausting. And summer, in and of itself, makes me tired.

So don't hold it against me if I'm not blogging, if I'm behind by half a dozen books. With any luck, I'm sneaking in a little nap.