Naps are diminishing at our house. I’m a tad devastated. Naps are when I do my blog. Naps are when I clean, fold laundry, pay bills, prepare meals. Naps – ahh. Well, my kids aren’t embracing them as much I’d like. It’s natural, and it’s actually a great time for Abby to be weening from them since kindergarten is around the corner. However, I wasn’t prepared for Kenzie to drop them, even though I have heard that the second and third children seem to drop them sooner than your first. I’ve tried to do quiet time, but I’ve recently set up a more structured time. I set a timer for a lot of things. I find it very useful during this quiet time. The first thirty minutes is reading or relaxing. They gather books and must be in bed. However, if they are not reading or relaxing, the timer starts over. The next 30 minutes is playing quietly. If they are acting in such a way that is requiring my attention, the timer starts over. If they have done fairly well with their quiet time, they get to watch a 30 minute show. That gives me at least 1 1/2 hours of time to do all of my duties of a house wife and mom. Never feels like enough, but I know I need the break too. I need to turn off the mommy thing for a bit or I’m out of resources for my husband and out of energy for parenting the rest of the day too. Not a good thing.
This sounds like a lot of what we used to do with our 4 kids and it worked great!