Summer schedule

I've been hesitant to write too much about our summer schedule until now since it seems like it might actually be sticking around. Since coming back from Spain in early July, we've been taking a pretty laid back approach to bedtime and very lackadaisical attitude towards naps. Experimenting with the no nap agenda in recent years always proved disastrous. We ended up with one (or sometimes two) frantically overtired kids who slept horribly that night as a kind of retribution for all the fun they had that day. It just never made sense. Friends would say, "well, let Elisa skip her nap and she'll really sleep good tonight."  But no, I would think. That's not how it goes in this family. Skipping a nap meant paying for it later. If we managed to enjoy a long day out and about, we would be woken up nearly every hour for most of the night with a screaming, inconsolable child.  As a toddler, Carolina proved to be the same way. I had almost embraced my life as a stay-at-home nap-monitoring mom. They gave me a break for a couple of hours, and then I would be able to take them out late. This didn't always work well during the school year when Elisa would get home from the bus dead tired and Carolina was raring to go post-nap at 5 p.m. But now that summer gave us more flexibility, I was willing to see how it might go. And in Spain we saw that for a few days a week at least, we could let them have a quiet time in the afternoon without actually sleeping. Fast forward a month into summer and I have enforced the nap only a handful of times. It just feels like we can go longer and--wait for it--the night time sleep is actually fine. They are even sleeping longer! Like til 10 a.m. some mornings. I really don't want to gloat about it since I feel like it's such a fluke. But man, waking up between 9-10 a.m. after so many years of 5:30, 6:30, 7 a.m.s....well, it feels awesome. So roll on, summer schedule. We'll take you for as long as you want to stick around.