Alas, The Day Has Come

So the day that every stay-at-home-parent dreads has finally visited our home: Caleb has given up napping. Now, I know that many of you out there lost your "break" time months before your child was 3 1/2, but I was holding out hope that I was one of the really lucky ones, and that Caleb would keep napping until he was five :) It is now the fourth day of no afternoon sleeping, and I am officially giving up. I would have tried for a few more days, but we had a naptime disaster yesterday that deterred me from further efforts.

I tucked Caleb in for his "nap" (it was in quotes in my head because I doubted that it would happen), and went downstairs. Unlike the other days, where he kept coming downstairs and being put back in his bed, he stayed put. I thought, "What luck! He went to sleep!" But alas, this was not the case. About 45 minutes after I tucked him in, he came downstairs and said, "Mommy, I made a real bad choice. I'm real, real, real sorry." I realized while he was talking that he had not gone to sleep at all and that he had been up to some mischief in his room the whole time instead. With dread I asked him, "What bad choice, Caleb? What did you do?"

"I tear all the books up, Mommy. I real, real sorry."

I raced up the stairs to assess the damage. Sure enough, he had taken four library books, no less, and decimated the pages. Struck dumb from the horror of a book explosion in the room, I truly had no idea what to do or say. He had never torn a book on purpose in his whole life. And I'd never seen him do something so completely destructive, either. Usually I am pretty quick with consequences, but this situation warranted a call to Daddy for some ideas. What we came up with during the phone conference was this:

(1) All other library books would be returned and no more would be checked out for a month.
(2) All of his own books were taken out of his room.
(3) No reading books with Mommy or Daddy before bedtime for three nights.
(4) He would clean up the entire paper mess by himself (which he did).

I went over the consequences with him, and he was distraught, particularly about the books being taken out of his room and not reading books at night. We hope that these consequences will impress on his little mind the absolute unacceptability of destroying books (or anything else for that matter). Overall, not the most encouraging parenting day, but they can't all be encouraging :) Hopefully, I won't be even more upset about it when we go to the library tomorrow and pay for the books.