Sunday Naps

Naps have been difficult lately with Lucy. Well, not just lately - for a while. She used to go down between noon and 1pm, then it turned into between 1-2pm. But she fights her naps now (actually, has been fighting them for a while). And sometimes, we will just skip them and on those days, it's not so bad because she will go to sleep between 7-8pm which is heavenly. On days she does get naps, she often goes to sleep between  9-10pm, sometimes even later (which is torture!). Some days, the no-nap backfires and she can't help but fall asleep around 4 or 5 which results in her staying up until midnight (and believe me, we try to keep her up!). Any nap after 2 pm means a late night for us. Or rather, if she naps at ALL, she is up later than we want her to be. So we are definitely in a transition period, trying to figure out [survive] what is going to work for Lucy (and us) and it changes everyday.

We got a babysitter last night and went on an early date (we saw a matinee of the Artist and went to a Caribbean restaurant, Adobos for some authentic Puerto Rican food - so good!). Lucy didn't have a nap yesterday so we were hoping that she would go to bed early so we could enjoy another movie at home (Syriana - so sad and depressing). She fell asleep at 6:45 pm last night and woke up at 6:30 am this morning which was actually a good thing because then we hoped she would fall asleep around noon right after church on our way home. But it didn't happen. We tried putting her down for her nap after we got home and read books and laid down with her but to no avail. So we gave up, hoping that we could repeat yesterday and have her go to bed early again.

FAIL: I was reading my book on the couch (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Saffran Foer - so proud of myself for actually reading and blogging!) and noticed that Lucy was playing pretend mommy with her dolls and stuffed animals. First, she tucked in Baby Chia (she named her herself - I think a variation of Chihiro from the movie, Spirited Away) with her favorite pink blanket.

Then she lovingly placed teddy and lovey to sleep on her pillow pet. 

And then she settled down, right next to my legs as I was reading and put herself to sleep. I thought she was just playing pretend but then realized that she really had fallen fast asleep.

The whole set-up.

The clock reads: 3:05 pm. It's going to be a long night...