Nappy New Year

Fun fact:  a 38 year old male's motivation to write blog posts is in direct inverse proportion to the number of inches on the new TV that he and his wife bought themselves for Christmas.

Add to that a general fatigue resulting from the extremely unfortunate position of finally weaning a nearly-four-year-old off the daily nap and you have a recipe for extreme sloth.

I know, you're probably thinking that at almost-four, he should be well past the long daily nap, but that three hours of downtime in the middle of the day has really become special to us.

I mean, losing that time is like losing your lunch break at work.  Sure you can live without it, but you'd much rather be spending that time drinking malt liquor out of a paper bag in the parking garage than working/parenting, right?

Exactly.

Finn apparently feels the same way.  He's not really adjusting to the lost nap all that elegantly.  He now prefers to spend that three hours informing us in detail - either through words or actions - of all of the ways that we're ruining his life.  We are now in the position of having to decide whether we concede the nap and deal with a kid that won't go to bed until 11 pm, or if we push on through the nap, putting ourselves in the position of living with - and negotiating with - a three-year-old terrorist.

Sometimes we're lucky enough to do both.  After a disastrous attempt at skiing on Thanksgiving brought on by the weather, we decided to try again on New Year's Eve.  This time we were intent on doing it right and renting Finn some big boy skis instead of the little strap-ons he was using in the hopes that it would give him some more support and generally cause him to fall in love with skiing.   Kitty and I split up, with her taking first runs on the big girl slopes while I took Finn on the rope tow, with the plan that we switch places after an hour or so.  After getting him all geared up, skating across what felt like the entire mountain to get to the rope tow, and muscling our way up the entire tow we had probably our best run of his short skiing career.

After which Finn informed me that he was done skiing for the day.  I tried to convince him to take another run using my best motivation tactics:  threats.

Me:  "I'm afraid that if you don't want to take more than one run after all of that preparation, we just won't be able to go skiing any more.  It's too tiring for Daddy to do that all of that work."
Finn:  "Good.  I don't ever want to ski again."

Whoops.  After back-pedaling out of my violation of my cardinal rule of "motivation" (never threaten taking away something that you actually don't want to lose), we made our way back to the lodge in relative peace to wait for Kitty, who then got to spend the next two hours with a wailing banshee who wouldn't let her go to the bathroom or eat while I skied/called her from the chairlift to laugh at her sad predicament.

But it was all good in the end.  Finn actually fell asleep in the car on the ride home, which enabled him to make it all the way to midnight on New Year's Eve, which then enabled him to throw his first flaming meltdown of 2012 at approximately 12:15 AM on Jan 1.

Happy New Year!