I can assure you that no children were injured during this photo shoot.

A couple of weeks ago, while we were in the throes of the mess that was our home renovations (which reminds me, I need new pictures of that, don't I?), we also didn't have daycare. We switched daycares in the middle of the summer, and got to deal with not one but two weeks of daycare providers being on vacation. Great. To amp it up - just a little - P decided that her naps were optional. After all, she's 2-3/4 years old, so she's not old enough to vote, drink, or work but she can decide if it's naptime or not. When she does go to sleep, sometimes it doesn't happen until 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon, which makes for a challenging 8:00 bedtime.

On one particular day, she thought it would be fun to make me put her to bed three times, and G to put her down twice. We were trying to get work done (what? bills to pay? say it ain't so!). To her credit/defense, there was an awful lot of banging and pounding going on - it's hard to sleep when that's going on.

Finally it was quiet. G went up to check on her, and quickly, urgently whispered that I needed to get up there, pronto. I grabbed the camera, and here's what we found:


Note the fall-out of blankets, books, and stuffed animals all around the room. There was some raging going on up there while she fought off the urge to sleep.

A close-up:


She slept while G moved her quickly into her bed, and slept for a couple of hours. This is the kind of stuff that makes parenting such a challenge and then a reward: you know what's right for the child, the child disagrees heartily and fights it with every fiber of their being. Until they fall over, then you as a parent are once again vindicated as knowing what is right for that little person.

I just wondered what she was doing when she fell asleep - looks kind of like she was walking, then fell asleep mid-stride and fell over, doesn't it?