It seems to me, every time my kids are in a moving vehicle longer than thirty minutes, they are napping. Everyone is napping except the baby, the one person I would genuinely like to have a nap.
The seven and four year olds who wouldn’t nap indoors unless the house was on some sort of conveyor belt, fall asleep as soon as that thirty minute mark has been reached and it destroys a schedule we’ve been perfecting for years.
Maybe it’s in the exhaust they’re inhaling but whatever knocks out kids four and over, has the opposite effect on those thirteen months and younger. Her trick is to fall asleep when we are three minutes from arriving at our destination. This could mean a ten minute outing to the grocery store has her sawing logs at minute seven or a two hour trip to the cottage means at precisely one hour, fifty-seven minutes, she’s drooling on her onesie.
The nap is a tricky thing. If the baby naps for three minutes, she is unable to be transported into a proper bed without waking up, which really only works when we want her to wake up at which time she flops around like a ragdoll while we remove her outdoor gear, is licked by someone’s dog and beaned in the head with a flying super-ball but remains motionless, expressionless and in a fully relaxed dream-state.
When we tip-toe in, first setting up soft lullabies to serenade her, change the temperature on the thermostat in the house so it exactly matches the temperature in the vehicle removing the hot –to-cold or cold-to-hot shock to her system, we dim the lights, we spray car air freshener, crumble Cheerios around the carpet and speak as though we are radio announcers, any or all of which may have played a role in lulling her to sleep in the first place. She first opens her eyes as though the starter pistol has just been shot at a dog race, looks at us like she hasn’t a clue who we are, squints, scrunches up her scared, angry, sleepy little face, delays making a sound which means whatever is about to come out will be monumental and then a scream that can only be heard by those same racing dogs.
