The summer of his discontent

This is Isaac. 

And this is Isaac by about 3:30 PM on a day where he has not napped.

He’s three years old. He’s losing the nap. This is a natural, expected phenomenon; a routine developmental step. It’s just that I wish he didn’t have to be so astonishingly grumpy about the process. He comes home from the babysitter’s and immediately finds his blanket and drapes himself over the sofa or his bed or across the kitchen floor on a little blanket nest, removing his thumb from his mouth only to tell you that everything you do is wrong. Like singing. Or breathing. Or taking his picture.

As the late afternoon wears on, he winds himself up into a hyper fit of exhaustion that generally stops when he slams himself into a wall and crumples into a sodden mass of desperate tears and we carry him upstairs, howling “I NOT going to sleep! I NOT going to SLEEP!”

“Of course you’re not, buddy,” we tell him, lying him down and slipping pajamas onto him. “Of course you’re not.”