The Great Nap Strike of 2009

I'm beginning to realize just how lucky I was...

Monkey has been a GREAT sleeper! Really, I've had very, very few complaints. He started sleeping through the night right around 4 months, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've had to get up during the night with him since. Oh, he'll wake up from time to time, and sometimes he'll even cry, but it's amazing how often it only lasts for a minute or two and he goes right back to sleep.

He's been a great napper too. For as long as I can remember now, we've had the same schedule, more or less - two naps a day, one from about 10:30 - noon, and the other for 1 1/2 - 2 hours sometime between 2:30 and 6pm. It's been awesome - Mommy could shower during the morning nap, and get other stuff done, including work, in the afternoon.

And, perhaps best of all, we could brag to our family and friends about how well he went to bed. Almost as if on cue, Monkey would say "night night?", at which point I'd say "night night?" and he'd either (a) run to the bottom of the stairs and wait to be taken up, or (b) run to me to carry him up. We'd say night-night to Daddy, any visitors, etc., and Monkey would lay his head on my shoulder and give me a sweet hug as we went upstairs. I'd set him in his crib, where he'd take his paci, and then off with the lights and off to sleep - no fuss.

Well, needless to say, there's a reason this is all written in the past tense. Tor almost a week now, all schedules and routines have gone out the window. Monkey has decided to change up the game plan, only he's not telling us what the new one is...

We had a bit of a preview over the holidays, when we were traveling and his sleep got disrupted, but upon returning home, all was seemingly back to normal. Until last Wednesday - New Year's Eve. It's as if he wanted to do something significant to mark the start of a new year... It started with fussiness going down for naps, turned into refusing to take some naps at all, branched into fussiness at bedtime, and, most recently, took a whole new turn with an early 4am wake-up call. Mommy is TIRED.

I realize that the two-nap schedule couldn't last forever, and I'm willing to accept that, even if it does mean finding a new time to shower, possibly before I'd like to otherwise get myself out of bed in the morning... But isn't the remaining one nap supposed to become LONGER to make up for some of the lost sleep? Instead, it's gotten shorter, maybe an hour, if we're lucky, and often not without much protesting. When I say "night night?", Monkey now shakes his head at me, saying "no." When I put him in his crib, he immediately gets up on his feet and starts yelling. If I'm lucky, it lasts less than five minutes. If I'm not, it lasts until I'm afraid he's going to burst something, and we get up and wait to see if we can try again later.

This has to be temporary, right??? Surely my awesome sleeper can't have developed an overnight aversion to or lack of need for sleep?