The E-vite field for my son’s sixth birthday party said “event time.” I typed in 2 to 4. Just like that. Then I moved on to entering our home address and the comment “siblings welcome.” I plugged in the invitees’ email addresses and hit send.
Little did I know I’d just broken my own cardinal rule of parenting. The one that says:
All Afternoon Gatherings Involving Young Children Must Happen After 3 PM.
Why? Because most kids younger than five nap between noon and 3:00. Or their younger siblings do. Hosting a party that starts at 2 PM is like a detonating a dirty bomb in the Piazza San Family Schedule. No one will escape unscathed because a parent’s gory choices are:
1) Skip the nap, attend the party, and endure the writhing Hell of an overtired child
2) Skip the party so child can nap, miss the chance to eat cake/converse with real adults, and have angry/crestfallen kid
3) Split the family so the napper can get his rest at home while the other parent & child attend the party (nap-duty parent will face napper’s Tammy Faye tears and verbal abuse, plus week-long grudge)
4) Try a mini-siesta for the napper at home from 1:00 to 1:40 (attempting an earlier-than-usual nap never works). This really only nets about twenty minutes of sleep by the time she winds down. When you yank her from her REM cycle to leave for the party, she’s dazed/confused/wailing and won’t let you put her down for the next four hours. She dissolves into head-turning screams at the happy birthday song.
5) You skip the nap but the child falls asleep on the way to the party. You wring your hands, then finally leave him clocked in his car seat for two minutes while you sprint inside to tell the host the deal and deposit the older child. Back at the car, you keep the motor idling with the AC/heat on because it’s so hot/cold out. You constantly check the rear-view mirror for Al Gore, who’s due to show up any minute to cite you for your shameful carbon rave.
*
Two families invited to my son’s party were affected by our event time. One family chose option 1, and the other picked option 5. The tired children and their parents graciously weathered short fuses and long stints in a parked car. Now, several days later, I feel guilty about my mistake. The party time was immaterial to me, but it had a big impact on our friends. For young families, the difference of an hour can mean a relatively serene day, or an eight-hour struggle to bedtime. Because my kids no longer nap, I’d forgotten the 3:00 rule. I bow to a new parenting clock, one whose hands point to school dismissals, sports practices and homework deadlines. But the details of every phase of parenting are important, and I commit to studying up before planning social gatherings. Because part of what defines community is remembering what it was like.
Hey, if it eases your guilt any, Luke is STILL talking about your parties — you’ve created community for him in a big way, since you are still the only person whose cooking we trust (how lucky for us that you’re also the best cook/chef/designer of culinary wonders in the entire Cville realm). Just being able to eat chips out of the bowl like everyone else, to be able to dig into that unspeakably scrumptious chocolate cake with ice cream, just like everyone else — that was huge. On the way to school today I told him I’d packed him lasagna for lunch. He said, “Strawberry shortcake is still my favorite food ever — Whitney’s strawberry shortcake — but, OK, lasagna is good too.”
Parenting is a world of guilt. It begins the moment the pregnancy test comes back positive and – who KNOWS when it ends – I haven’t gotten to ride on that guilt-free Peace train, yet, and my “babies” are now old enough to LONG for a nap for themselves.
In the grand scheme of things, one afternoon nap, shaken loose from its moorings isn’t going to set the world out of kilter – it just seems like it at the time.
Jeez. This is like Chinese math or something!
Oh, wow, thank you, Mary! Maybe things netted out ok, thanks to your perspective. We love having Luke here.
I hated the rule of 3. I happened to have a child that cut out naps very early (3 months) because she was sleeping through the night like a champ (that trick started insanely early, at 2 and half weeks. Yes, weeks!). By the time she was two, afternoons were long and hard because everyone else was napping and she had no one to play with. No amount of selling I did could convince her to try one. I learned to run all our errands during that time, so that we could be free when everyone else wasn’t napping. I’m so happy to be far enough long that we don’t have to account for anyone’s naps anymore, just soccer practice.