Because life is not worth living without a cookie at bedtime

I feel more sane now, mainly because I am no longer full of raging lady hormones. But I also have a new lifestyle I am trying out to help keep me sane at the craziest of times. It is a radical change for me, but so far I have been rockin' it for a month strong. The major change in my life? No more mommy naps.

You'd think it would be my kids' sleep that would be the problem, but it's not. I am one of those lucky ladies whose 3-1/2 year old still naps for 3 hours every day. Since the Jake also only naps once, I put them both down around 1:30 or 2 and they are unconscious until dinner. Once they were down, my custom, then, would be to fart around on the 'net until I'd read everything twice on People magazine, and then I'd go lay down myself. "I am so tired!" I would tell myself. "I am still getting up to attend to Jake every night, and sometimes with that crazy Isaac, and even the cat! Wow, do I need some sleep!" And when I put it like that, it certainly sounds like I do.

But then enter the reality of it all, where I lay down and it takes me 20 minutes to fall asleep because I'm thinking about all the things left undone by my napping. Usually, no dinner. Dirty dishes. Scuzzy, cluttered house. Any chores that absolutely had to be done would eat into the babies' playtime and eat eat eat away at my guilt-ridden core as they pleaded with me to do even the simplest of anythings with them. And then there is the sleep itself, that will inevitably be unsatisfying because it will be interrupted by the first boy to awaken. This taste of a sleep-filled heaven, so crudely stolen from me in mid-day by a boy ready to rock-n-roll, would make me bitter and angry for the rest of the day.

So one day I chose not to fall asleep. Was I tired? Yes. But instead of gambling on the remote chance of a restful nap, I was given concrete rewards that came from three unadulterated hours of housework. Do you know how much you can get done in three hours? It's quite a lot. Let me put it like this: the first day, I had so much time that I scrubbed out my bathroom trash can. Oh yeah.

Since I gave up naps, my house is so much tidier. My bathroom actually gets cleaned, down to the floor; my kitchen floor gets swept and mopped. My relieved husband comes home to a decluttered house. Also, dinner is better. I have the time and energy to make side dishes (I know!). Once a week, I make rolls from scratch. Once a week, I bake cookies from scratch. And the sheer Betty-Crocker joy of sending your kids to bed with tummies full of cookies and milk, to me, is worth giving up an afternoon of lazy bumhood.