Saturday, February 25, 2012

A couple of days back, I blogged about how I stockpile sleep.  Responding to a comment made on that blog, got me to thinking.  So I thought I’d share….

When I was little, I adored preschool.  I couldn’t get enough of free play indoor time and being able to run around outside, burning off all my stored energy.  But there was one part of preschool I absolutely loathed—nap time.  Even today, I can vividly recall how frustrating it was and how desperate I was to avoid it.

Not sure about how other preschools handled nap time, but at mine, every child was given a mat to lay down on and there they had to remain for a full twenty minutes not moving—at all.  If they squirmed or fidgeted, they were reprimanded.  For me, lying still for even a few minutes was a challenge.  But a whole twenty minutes?  I would have preferred a slow painful death.  In fact, that’s what it felt like, each…and…every day.

I’d see the mats come out after lunch and begin to cringe.  To me, it made absolutely no sense to make us kids sleep or lay still right after having eaten.  Even to this day, I can’t abide by naps.  They still make me squirm.

The way I saw it, my body would tell me when it was sleepy.  And naptime at preschool just wasn’t it for me.  In fact, at home, I couldn’t stand having an early bedtime that caused me to lay in bed for hours each night, unable to fall asleep as I watched the second hand, minutes and then hours crawl by.  Usually this frustration would end with me being reduced to tears from my overwhelming frustration.  Most nights, that’s how I finally fell asleep. 

To this day, I refuse to go to bed until my body tells me it’s had enough and needs to sleep.  My thinking is, what’s the point of just laying in bed, re-living those frustrating naps and early bedtimes of years-gone-by?