Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Is your preschooler smarter than a laundry hamper?

Brenna has decided that napping is over-rated.

I, on the other hand, do not agree. In fact, I think that naps are highly under-rated - both for myself and for my child.

Since, I am still bigger, older, and theoretically smarter, than my child, I get to make the decisions about who naps. And I decide that Brenna naps.

Granted, I can't actually force her to sleep. At least not without resorting to off-label, double-the-recommended dosage use of common OTC medication. So the rule for nap is: You don't have to sleep but you do have to stay in your room and be quiet for a minimum of 90 min. (Or until mommy decides she has had sufficient quiet time, whichever is longer.)

Which brings us to naptime this past Saturday. Brenna is in her room playing quietly. She has only come out about 35 times in the first 15 min to see if nap time is over. Under threat of not getting to go to her playdate later in the afternoon, she has retreated and remained in her room for about 25 consecutive minutes.

Mommy is enjoying some ACC basketball and a complete lack of 3-year old chatter.

Suddenly, Brenna is screaming bloody murder like she is being attacked in her room. I quickly look around and see that the cat is snoozing happily in a sunspot so it's not his fault, and I take off running toward Brenna's room and the hysterical screams.

I fly into her room expecting...well, I don't even know what, something horrible for sure.
Instead, I am confronted with the sight of my child trapped in her collapsable flower laundry hamper! (just like this one --------->)

Somehow, she has managed to pull the hamper over her head and cover her entire body. (I guess that's not much of a feat when you consider that she is a whopping 34" tall)

Then she managed to get her knees curled up near her chest. I guess she then decided that maybe being in a laundry hamper wasn't all that and getting out would improve her play time. At which point, it appeared that she became stuck and had fallen over on her side, where she was doing quite the impressive immitation of a turtle stuck on its back (well, minus the screaming. I've never heard a turtle scream.)

In response to this sight I had a massive parent empathy fail and burst into laughter while extracting my hysterical child from her laundry hamper jail. (I did maintain sufficient humanity to giver her a hug immediately...while still laughing of course.) It goes without saying that my laughter was not appreciated. Nor was my first comment to her, "Well, sweetie, I guess that's why we put laundry and not our bodies into laundry hampers."

This comment was met with the most pathetic tear-stained look. And I managed to redeem myself somewhat by saying "I bet that was really scary!" She agreed with this statement wholeheartedly.

Needless to say, nap was over after that.





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