Rocking the Toddler to Sleep

Confession:  I rocked Alaska to sleep for her nap this afternoon.  She has been a champ at going down for naps and sleeping through the night since baby-age.  Like, pridefully good.

But lately she has better things to do than to take naps.  Play with Kitty Kitty, look at books, run around like a crazy and tag along behind me as I clean a bathroom and pick up the bedrooms.  I let is slide for two days and then that was enough.  After shutting her in her room for half a hour, I always caved at her 'tap-tap-tapping'.  She can't open doors yet, and we plan to keep it that way as long as possible.  Is that crippling a child?  I don't know.  But it keeps her in her room at nap time, and that is the battle right now.

Only, the peculiar thing about her nap-time scamming is that instead of playing with her toys, she tends to sit by the door and holler.  ALL of her toys are in her room.  But she sits at the door and cries with a diaper in hand.  Because she has learned that if I check on her and she's got a diaper in hand it guarantees a bum check, and that's 15 seconds more than if I were to walk in there and lay her in bed again.  Smart girl we've got on our hands here.

I had my battle armor on for today and left her in there for one hour and forty-five minutes.  Oh Please, don't look at me that way.  I can see the judging in your eyes.  I did check on her every half-hour.  And I did know she was fine.  And believe me, I felt every single cry for 'maaaaaamaaaaa' that came through that door.  It made it very hard to concentrate of anything else.  So keep your judgy eyes to yourself.

15 minutes before my last ditch effort of letting her out of her room I swaddled her and tucked her into my arms in our stuffed rocking chair.  I sang a few songs and her eyes were closed in 5 minutes.  A total of 10 minutes and I was laying her down in bed.

Those 10 minutes that I sang to her, I watcher her little face.  Those deep-brown eyes that have always looked back at me, so strong and alert.  Always alert from day one.  Her whipped cream complexion has been darkened by the sun and her skin tells the truth on me, that we don't always do lotion after baths anymore.  Her forehead tells of tears, a few spots of fresh skin that were healing under dark scabs during the warmest days of summer.  The scars will fade with the next sun tan in the spring.  But right now they peek, shy out of slumber.  Under usual circumstances she's moving too fast for anyone to notice.  Her small nose and miniature ears looks less like doll details and more child size.  I breathe in deep while kissing her forehead and it's not the same milky johnson's baby smell that filled my nose the last time I held her like this.  The only thing remotely the same, as my arm starts to tingle from her heavy head, is her eyelashes.  Long and feather-like, they always remind me of butterfly wings.  Softly curling at the edges as they swipe across the tops of her cheek.  Butterfly-like not only in their dainty design, but in the fact that just when you think a butterfly is going to stay a while, the lift up their wings and fly.  Just as you think those eyes are going to stay closed and they flutter open at the smallest movement.

I took her to bed and lay her down, eye-lids barely opening and kissed her one more time before tip-toeing out and closing the door.  She slept two hours and I got my 'my time' for one more day.