How To Put Your Baby Down For A Nap – Movie-Style

Baby naptime: the Holy Grail of parenting. If you can just get it right, you can get the washing up done, have a shower, or get your head down yourself (dream on!). But as any parent knows, baby naptime can be a fragile, unpredictable affair. It is Mission Impossible. But never fear! As with most things in life, you can learn how it’s done from the movies! Here’s how to turn Mission Impossible into En-Nap-Ment.

Mission Impossible

We’ve all been there. You’ve fed, winded, and changed your baby. He has yawned (yessss!) but you are not yet in the dreaded Overtired Zone. You’ve plumped your pillow ready for your weary head. You’ve put your phone on silent, after setting the alarm so neither of you sleeps too long and misses the school run (yeah, right!). All you have to do is pop him in his bed. You bend over to put him down, keeping your body against his, despite the protestations from your screaming back. So far so good. You lay him down as gently as this most precious thing in the world deserves. Still going well. You gently slide your hands out from under him. His eyes flip open and he starts to scream. You want to cry. So does your back.

What you need is a harness, Tom Cruise-style! Then you could simply lower yourself and the baby down from the ceiling, with none of the strain on your back. After depositing him, you could comfortably keep your hands there for a couple of minutes. If the eyes flicked open, there would be your reassuring face, millimetres from his. Slowly, slowly, you could winch yourself up, up and away. Mission Accomplished.

 

Entrapment

The baby’s down, but now I have to get out of the room. You might think that one of the airborne superheroes might be a good role model for this. Spiderman, for example. But look at him, swinging around all over the place, making little comic asides into his mask, eyes only for Mary-Jane. What use is that? Any baby would spot you a mile off. No. You need to make like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment. Just like the red lasers guarding the priceless mask she tries to steal in the film, bedroom hazards guard your priceless baby’s right to stay awake as long as he wants. You have to silently – and without being able to see them, thanks to the blessed blackout blinds – contort yourself through these; number 1, of course, being your baby’s line of sight. Stumble across that beam and all is lost. This limits your escape route to anywhere below cot level. But there are other traps too: that creaky floorboard, the VTech baby laptop you forgot to turn off, the bear with the squeaky heart, the knob of the chest of drawers, the crunkly wrapper left on the floor by one of your older kids. Encounter any of these and the game is up. You’re done for. But by channelling the agility of CZJ, you can turn Entrapment into En-Nap-Ment. If only my derriere were so shapely.

 

Peter Pan

 I got busted tonight as I hovered outside my baby’s room checking if he’d gone to sleep so I could safely go on to child 2. Betrayed by my own shadow, no less! There it was, looming larger than life on the wall with the landing light behind me, causing my wee one to stand up and bellow immediately – or as quick as he could in his grobag, poor thing. Foiled again! Why oh why didn’t I emulate Peter Pan and lose the treacherous thing?

 

Three Men and a Baby

Failing all the above, you could just get three guys with dodgy hairstyles to sing your baby to sleep. Good night, sweetheart.

I never thought I’d want anything more than a nap – but right now, I’d rather have a place in the Brilliance in Blogging final! If you liked this, I’d be so happy if you would pop me in for the Laugh, Fresh Voice or Writer category. Just click on the badges below!

NOMINATE ME BiB 2014 FRESH VOICENOMINATE ME BiB 2014 LAUGHNOMINATE ME BiB 2014 WRITER
 
Related posts:
Kids’ Bedtime – The Last Straw – featuring The 7pm-8pm Vortex. “You can be primed, kids in PJs, teeth done, their eyes (despite themselves) drooping, sitting on the bed about to read a story at 7pm. You feel pretty smug. But then, the Vortex opens. It has no mercy. It can sense a parent desperate for a break and it will gape its all-encompassing jaws and swallow time. That hour will be gone.  It is beyond your control.” 
 
Picture credits: the relevant film studios.


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