Benefits of Boredom

The girls haven’t been taking naps for quite a few months now, really ever since they started afternoon preschool a couple days a week and weren’t napping on those days.  I thought I would desperately miss having them sleep in the afternoon, but it’s worked out well.  They used to sleep from 2-4 or 5 and then lie awake in their beds until 10 or 10:30 at night, which wasn’t ideal.  Now, they play in their beds for 1-2 hours and then usually fall asleep very soon after they’re put to bed around 8:30.  I still have the downtime in the afternoon where they’re out of my hair (well, other than repeatedly jogging upstairs to tell them to keep their voices down for their brothers’ sakes), and they’re less groggy in the morning because they fall asleep earlier at night.  It wasn’t a seamless transition, because it took a while for the evening grumpiness to wear off when they stopped napping, but on the whole, it’s working out for everybody. 

And one bonus is that I get to be entertained by their imaginative antics while confined to their beds in the afternoon.  Yesterday I went in to get them up, and I found them both sitting in large boxes (that I had placed in their beds earlier, per their request).  Susie gleefully announced, “Look!  We’re Jack-in-Boxes”!