Are you sleeping, little one?

I seem to squish everything I need to do that requires more than thirty seconds of concentration into Ava's naps. Ava's naps, of course, are not predictable in any sense, except that there is at least one a day, sometimes two, and they can arrive anywhere in between 10AM and 4PM.

The other toddlers in our playgroup seem to have predictable naps, but even when I was at home full time with Ava, her naps were never predictable.

It's always a mystery how she'll go to sleep. In the day she falls asleep in the car if she's tired and I've become an experienced transporter in moving her from car to crib without waking her up. The biggest thing is to go slow and make no sudden movements.

Night sleep is always interesting. I've never been a "cry it out" kind of Mom, that is, I can't really let her cry in her crib for more than 5 minutes without coming to her rescue. Before I was breaking her from nursing, and then from the bottle, she used to crash from those. With the bottle I could lay her down at say 7 or 8PM, hand her a bottle, and she'd drink it and crash. No fuss, most nights. But now, I try not to give her a bottle because she's 14 months old and according to doctors who say they know their stuff, that's time to quit the bottle habit. So the question became, how to get her to sleep. Some nights, I rock her while saying the words to Goodnight Moon, because after reading that book only five hundred times, I have it entirely memorized. Sometimes the pacifier is, well, pacifying, but lately we've been trying to break that habit too.

Some nights I just let her stay up until she starts to rub her eyes or fall into a pillow on the ground and struggle like a drunk person to get up. This happened around 9PM last Saturday (daylight savings curse) and I actually laid her down in her crib, promising to come check on her in a few minutes, and wouldn't you know it, my little darling rolled over and went to sleep.

I would pay good money to have all nights go that smoothly.