What to do when your child won't nap
It's actually an easy solve.
Step 1: Bang your head against a wall. By adding an actual bruise to match your pre-existing migraine, your body will begin to understand that there is actually something wrong with your physical circumstances and you aren’t just making this up.
Step 2: Give the child a new blanket. It’s basically the same as the current one they have, but they will think you’ve done them a kindness. As if sustaining and funding their entire existence isn’t kind enough.
Step 3: Try to remember if the child has eaten anything in the past week.
Step 4: Remember that you should eat something. The emptier the carbs the better.
Step 5: Contemplate giving the child alcohol. That’s something the parents of old did. It may have been for a different ailment, but what’s one dram of whiskey?
Step 6: Come to your senses. Water.
Step 7: Break that glass of water in the sink when the child refuses it and demands milk instead.
Step 8: Call a friend and vent.
Step 9: Call your spouse and tell them that your friends are idiots who don’t understand you or your problems.
Step 10: Give the child a new stuffed animal.
Step 11: Okay, a toy. Any toy.
Step 12: Scare them. Open the door fast and furious. Don’t yell, but raise your voice to a level that communicates you’re mad enough to where you could yell at any moment. Tuck them in with a vengeance—as if the goal isn’t to actually make them cozy but to go through the same motions in an overtly angry way. Leave with a vague and grandiose threat you can’t possibly follow through on. Something like, “If you make anymore noise, I’m taking all of your toys away forever.”
Step 13: Tell yourself it’s ok to cry, but don’t cry.
Step 14: Open the door and throw an unpeeled banana into the crib. Let the child figure out what to do with that.
Step 15: Do some online shopping. Take whatever money remains in your diaper budget and find something of equal or greater value that you don’t need but could theoretically want. Put it in the cart. Don’t checkout.
Step 16: Go outside. Feel guilty for deliberately removing yourself from earshot of the child’s cries. Stay outside anyway.
Step 17: Peek your head back inside. Hear nothing. Begin to dream, to wonder if this could really be it, if the child might actually be asleep. Walk all the way inside. Allow yourself to smile. Wonder why you were even upset in the first place. Hear the child say your name.
Step 18: Bang your head into a wall.
Step 19: Go to the child. Pick them up, and tell them you love them and that nap time is over and that they are free to resume their life of leisure. Let them place further demands on you and acquiesce to them without complaint.
Step 20: Buy the thing you put in the shopping cart.
Thanks for reading this far.
- jd
And also…
Baylor was never going to beat Duke. That’s just life.
The worst thing that has ever happened to my golf game happened to me last week and it is that I accidentally saw a video of someone explaining a swing drill that helps remove a slice and I started practicing it and in the process I completely forgot how to swing a club. T’s and P’s are appreciated as I seek to find it again.
Last week, I mentioned I love a new pair of shoes. The opposite is true of socks. I prefer those somewhat worn in.
I cried during this week’s episode of Survivor. I feel no shame in that.
The earlier the tee time the better.
