Tucked In and Tuckered Out

As I may have mentioned before, Peeper is no longer napping.

Oh, she'd love to take a nap every day, around four or five o'clock, for about three hours, but as you can imagine, that's not so good for bedtime.

Given the options of a nap (long, short, infinitesimal) that would keep her up until midnight or later, and powering through to an eight or nine o'clock bedtime, what would you choose?

So, this new routine means that just about every day, we have a sleepy, cranky period in the late afternoon, which usually includes Peeper nursing while I poke her and tickle her and generally annoy her, while saying "No napping!"

One might think that it would be easier to just distract her with something else and not let her nurse when she's so sleepy and vulnerable to conking out, but even without the actual sleep, nursing does help her to settle down and recharge and catch her second wind, so she can make it to bedtime in a more pleasant mood.

This evening, after having been warned a few times that it was "Almost time to tell Sesame Street night-night and get goody in Mama's chair," and literally about a minute before the end of the "very last" video, she asked to nurse.

About two seconds later, she unlatched and looked and me and said, "It's okay if I go to sleep?"

Oh yes, baby, it is more than okay.

She asked to turn off the video and have good in the bed, and by the time I made a quick stop at the potty, she was there waiting fo rme, with her dog "Bingo."

(He was originally named "Pat" after one Sesame Street video, but has been renamed "Bingo" after a different video, in which a little girl shows us her bedtime routine, which includes "I always sleep with my dog, Bingo." Peeper has a dog that looks just like the dog in the video, so he immediately became "Bingo" and she thinks she "always sleeps with him," although she often forgets.)

I guess she wasn't the only one who was ready for bed, because as you can see in the photo, it wasn't yet 9 pm when we lay down, and the next thing I knew, it was about 11:30 pm. And the next next thing I knew, it was about 3:30 am.

And now it's 5:30 am and here I am blogging with a fake timestamp.