My mother sometimes says that babies (toddlers, children) should come with instruction manuals. I’m thinking they should also come with indicator lights. Just maybe a row of them down the kid’s back. Getting sick: red light! About to have a growth spurt, don’t buy new clothes this week: green light! No longer needs a nap: yellow light! Like that.

Because the non-sleeping toddler? Who was not teething? Is now sleeping at night. She just stopped napping. Last week, with the nap, she was getting maybe nine hours of sleep total out of twenty-four (three at nap, six at night). The last several days, no nap, she’s sleeping twelve hours straight at night. And she’s cheerful all day.

I think that may be a chorus of angels I hear singing over us right now. Or maybe it’s just me.

Our oldest two kids stopped napping by the time they turned two, so I guess Sadie not needing a nap anymore shouldn’t have been a surprise. Except! Except! Audrey stopped napping regularly… about six weeks ago. She’s almost four. So you can see how I didn’t think to encourage the two-year-old to skip her nap. Even though I’ve done this whole parenting-a-toddler thing a couple of times before. Even though maybe I should have a handle on the details by now. Yeah, no.

The thing is, the less sleep I get, the less I am able to think of logical solutions for getting more sleep. So it’s good that we stumbled onto an answer there, because otherwise we might have kept getting less and less sleep every week until I withered up and died. (Yes, just me. Neither the toddler nor the husband are the withering kind.)

Like I said: indicator lights. That would help.