Post-Nap Depression

Last month, my friend, Anjie, wrote this post. It is hilarious. Her son, Reagan, had woken up from a nap in a majorly bad mood. My other friend, Angela, commented that her daughter sometimes wakes up grumpily from a really restful nap, and that she calls it "post-nap depression." I chuckled at that, because my kids suffer the same problem from time to time. Here is Dylan, who actually took a nap one Sunday (It's getting harder and harder to get the kid to take naps. That's how I was as a kid. I did not want to miss out on anything):

As you can see, he was experiencing some post-nap depression.

Here's Sadie, suffering from the same problem:

She was not happy about the spontaneous photo shoot. :) She cried for, like, an hour, and I had had enough, so I did something very, very naughty...

Let me back up. When Sadie turned three, I told her she was too old for her sippy cups; that she had to drink from normal cups, like Dylan. I washed them all and put them on my ledge by my stairs, for me to pack away for Micah to use when he turns one:

I took sippy cups away from Dylan at age three, as well, but we have a few sport bottles hanging around, and if they're clean, I let the kids use them to drink their drinks from. Dylan calls them "White Big Boy Sippy Cups." I know; quite a mouthful. We have a couple of white ones, and I just inherited this one from my first 5K a couple of months ago:

The thing about White Big Boy Sippy Cups is that they leak if you don't plug the tops well, and the tops are kind of stiff - hard for small kids to pop down and up. Dylan does okay, but Sadie does not. After a couple of weeks of near-constant spills from Sadie's use of these... well, I'll shorten it for you - WBBSC's, I was like, no. You can just drink from normal cups. No WBBSC's for you, Sade. Which made her sad, because when you have a WBBSC, you can sit on the couch and watch Bambi, cuddling your favorite stuffed animal, Saw, and wrap yourself up in a blanket, drinking away. When you have a cup, you aren't allowed in the living room with it. Not very pleasurable.

Alright, now to the naughty part. Sadie was inconsolable after her nap, and I desperately needed to cook dinner. So...... I gave her a sippy cup and turned on Bambi:

Bad, bad, bad. And I've continued letting her use them, because they really are kind of an emotional crutch for her. When I wake her up in the morning for preschool, she is a beastmaster, but if I wake her up with a fresh sippy cup full of chocolate milk, she can cope better. It's like some peoples' early morning cup of coffee. Or my lunchtime Coke. It just makes life a little bit easier to cope with. So just call me Enabler.