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Sleeping Like a Baby

Emma's naps rule my life. I am no longer on the same clock as the rest of the Pacific coast, or the rest of the civilized world for that matter. I now operate on Pacific Nap Time. Instead of AM and PM, my day is broken down into BN, DN, and AN, which stand for Before Nap, During Nap, and After Nap, respectively. All my scheduling now occurs within this context.

Emma's naps are the fundamental units of any remaining sanity in our household, and therefore receive the highest posible priority. A missed nap is a Red Alert situation. All hands on deck. There is such a thing as a baby who is too tired to go to sleep, and if you have never been around one, you don't want to know about it.

Lulling Emma to sleep, putting her down, and getting her up again afterwards ... the whole nap culture shapes my days. Emma normally takes two naps a day; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. But beyond this point it gets complicated. The naps range from 15 minutes to three hours in length and can strike at any time.You don't want to go out on errands with a sleepy baby; getting her in and out of the car seat is very disruptive. I don't even try it anymore. Nowadays, if I miscalculate her Awareness Cycle and she nods off a block from the house I will scrub the mission and resort to Plan B, which involves dishes or laundry, or Plan C, which involves lunch.

You can't overestimate the importance of your baby's naps. Their rapidly-growing little bodies need the downtime to recover from the day's radical expenditure of energy, and you need a few minutes to yourself to rest, meditate, or perhaps fold forty pounds of laundry. Sometimes you will just need this time to read something besides "Pat The Bunny," which may be a timeless piece of children's literature, but is probably better known for its fake bunny-fur insert on page four than for its grindingly predictable plot and insipid dialogue.

A sleepy baby is a powder keg, the only notable difference being that it is OK to jiggle a sleepy baby. Here at Homedaddy Inc¾, our research team has developed several proprietary techniques for shepherding the groggy infant into Dreamland. The early favorite was a simple stroller ride with the seat in the reclined position. This was found to be even more efficient over slightly bumpy terrain. Unfortunately the underlying logic did not translate to related techniques; our early experiments with a car seat, duct tape, and a paint-mixing machine produced disappointing results.

Audio, or sound technique has been another exciting avenue of nap research. Acting on an anonymous tip, we found that the sound of a hair dryer causes Emma, provided she is in a pre-nap condition, to abandon her current train of thought in favor of a sudden interest in the insides of her eyelids. Normally, it takes only a couple of minutes of this sound to produce sleep. The experts are divided in their theories of why this works. The best explanation is that there is something mind-numbing about the sound of hot air rushing past. We tested this theory by watching C-SPAN and found the results to be conclusive: In all test cases, the subjects were sound asleep in a matter of seconds.

Once your baby is asleep, you've got to put her down without waking her, a process which takes us back to the powder keg analogy: one false move and bingo. A baby can be asleep in your arms so soundly that a slamming door won't cause a twitch, but she'll still jerk suddenly awake at your first hint of a motion towards the bed. Some days it can take so many attempts that the morning nap becomes the afternoon nap by default.

And when you do succeed, you're still not out of the woods. If you wish to do something in another room you must use a so-called baby monitor, which differs from the military issue walkie talkie primarily in the use use of puppies and kittens as a design motif. By using the baby monitor, not only do you free yourself up to move around the house, but you also provide your child with a valuable vocational skill; children who are used to being monitored with an electronic listening device will have an easier time adapting to corporate culture as adults.

Nowadays I just let her nap on the bed, although in the early months we used a bassinet. Hey, here's a little trivia for you: The bassinet is named for the famous Chief Basinet of the Nez Perce Indians, whose small but hardy band, although driven to fatigue, built ingenious treehouses to allow the tribe's 500 exhausted children to sleep peacefully, undisturbed and undiscovered by the U.S. Cavalry. Strangely, it was the world of auto racing that chose to recognize this heroic chapter in history by staging a major race each year to commemorate the event ... don't tell me you've never heard of the Indian Nap-less 500 ...

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.