Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say farewell to a dear friend: the two to three hour nap that Elsa and Clio have taken each morning for the last eight months.
I think we can all agree, it was a good nap. A merciful nap. The kind of nap that allowed us to go back to bed and get a little more sleep, if we so chose. The kind of nap which is in part responsible for the fact that I've manage to write almost an entire second draft of a novel since the girls were born. The sort of nap that was always there for us, whether we needed to catch up on email or do household chores or even just enjoy a nice cup of coffee and a magazine in peace. We knew that the morning nap -- unlike the less predictable, much shorter afternoon one -- would never let us down, and we were grateful for it.
But for everything, there is a season. And the season of the morning nap has now passed. Though we tried in vain to make it linger, we realized -- as we always realize -- that we are powerless in the face of two wide-awake babies who will have none of it. Babies who will fling their pacifiers out of the crib and scream bloody murder until mommy, who was supposed to get to sleep in today and would have made some different choices last night had she known she couldn't, has to drag her tired butt out of bed and hang out with them for the next three hours. To everything, turn, turn, turn, etc.
Of course, this cloud does have a silver lining: the girls seem to be sleeping later in the mornings these days, until the humane hour of seven, even seven-thirty. And, with hope, they will take a nice long early afternoon nap, which we will love and embrace and accept just as we did the morning nap. It won't be the same, but we will survive. We will go on.
Good bye, morning nap. You will be missed.
Places to go, people to see, nap shnap. (Author's note: they insist on wearing these absurd hats all the time. Who are we to stop them? Again, powerless.)
