Tired Monday Morning

Dealing with babies and young children isn't nearly so difficult when they sleep at night. A lot of people have told me this. More than two years in to bringing up G, I have to agree. She's always been a very good sleeper, so on the rare occasions when she's not, it generally leads to widespread tears and whining. From me.

This morning was one such occasion. G seemed to be coming down with a bit of a cold last night, which may have been the reason why she kept waking up. Now that she's in a proper bed, instead of just drifting back off to sleep, she can now get up and toddle about. Which means either I or Mrs J has to get up and put her back into bed. G usually does this willingly enough, but a whole night of it left both her and me rather short of sleep when we got up for good at the shockingly early (for her) time of 7am.

Knowing I'd have to try to bring back the much lamented afternoon nap for one day only, the morning was all about attempting to keep G occupied so she wouldn't realise how tired she was. The picture shows us having a go at her fancy playdough set's "haircut" feature, which was enough to entertain her for quite a while.

Things only went downhill when I tried to get her into some warm clothes so we could go out in the cold to the local Post Office. G didn't want to put her shoes on. When I put them on for her, she took them off. When I put them on again, she lay face down on the floor and delivered her first-ever proper legs-kicking, arms-beating tantrum, which lasted throughout the time it took to get her into the car and defrost the windscreen (this was only about five minutes at the most, although it seemed like about an hour and a half).

G calmed down once we got there, although she wanted to come straight back home after. In an attempt to encourage her to rediscover naptime, I lay quietly on the sofa-bed in her room after putting her in bed. I could have sworn she started snoring almost straight away, but when I looked up I saw a familiar pair of eyes looking back at me, quizzically. I decided to go back to an old tactic of going downstairs, and ignoring her half-hearted cries until they stopped. It worked in the end, but I'm ready for a nap myself now.