Blowing & Drifting

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.

Outsmarting the Wees

I'm home right now for a little mid-day break, minding Julia - who's sound asleep - while Shannon takes Genevieve to a short-notice doctor's appointment (runny nose, drooling, roller-coaster fussiness). As I arrived home, Shannon was just waking Gigi up from her afternoon nap, which had started quite a while before and, but for the rude interruption, probably would have gone on for quite a while longer.

It seems like that's always the way. Your baby hardly ever naps longer than an hour, except on the day when she goes down three hours before a doctor's appointment. Your kid wakes up reliably at 6:30 every morning, until the one day you have to be somewhere at 8, and then she sleeps in and forces you to wake her up. It's clearly a plot.

I propose, in an effort to outsmart the wee ones, that we, the parents of America, enlist a network of physicians - the more specialized, the better - with whom we can make real-but-fake appointments, carefully timed to occur, for instance, 90 minutes after the start of a nap that's usually 60 minutes long. Say your daughter is several hours into the red after a couple short nights and a missed nap. No problem! You just call the next morning to make an appointment with the metatarsal cytologist for 30 minutes after the girl normally wakes up from her hour-long afternoon nap. Then write the appointment on the calendar, loudly announce it to the kid(s), adjust a snack or meal around it, blog about it, or take any other measures needed make it real. Automagically, the hour's nap will stretch to three hours, "breaking" the "appointment" and making everyone happy - the rested kid, the now-relaxed mom, even the doctor, who will thus work off some of the bad karma that accumulates in collecting $25 co-pays from parents who are told after a moment's exam of the kid, "Yep - it's a cold. Could last a week more. Call if she gets a fever."