The Walmart Nap

As I've said many times over, my youngest child thinks he can survive on NO sleep. And for some reason, it just works for him. He's almost 15 months and takes one 1 hour nap a day. He goes to bed early (7:30pm) so I can't complain AT ALL about that, but he seems to think that 5am is a great time to wake up and that all of us should be up at that time. Which would be fine if I were a morning person...but I'm SOOOO not! So yesterday Spencer decided to get up at 5am and I let Adam sleep since he got up with Spencer the day before. We went about our usual Friday morning, having my friends' daughter over in the morning as we do every Friday since we swap sitting while we each work in our kids' classrooms each week. Sorry. I realize this is turning into what's known in our family as a "Malan story"...a much longer drawn out version of what happened! But that's ok since I use this as my journal--I can't feel too bad for being too long! Ok. So we watched Katy and then Spencer was still running around like a maniac so I decided we'd brave the idiots um, people, at walmart and go grocery shopping since we were out of the basics...milk, bread, etc. So Spencer falls asleep on the drive over, great, and I thought, "That's ok. He'll wake up when I put him in the shopping cart and then we can go home and he can take a nap." He chose yesterday to do something I've never seen before. I stuck him in the cart and he stayed asleep. I tried to position the kid just right but there was no way to support his poor floppy head. He just flopped it backwards over the metal bar. And he didn't seem to mind. But it was really disturbing to watch. So I thought I would watch all the reactions of people as we went about our shopping.

And I discovered there were 3 reactions of people really. 1) Look at Spencer and not really process that my child looks dead and his head is flung backwards weird and then just walk on and keep up that busy shopping. 2) Look at Spencer, realize something is wrong with this picture of this kid in the shopping cart but not really stare long enough to be able to comprehend what's wrong with this picture. More of just confusion on their faces. OR 3)Look at Spencer, look at me, realize that children don't usually sleep like this and make a comment, but not comment to me though--just comment to themselves about this child and how they've never seen anything like this before! Some were little old ladies who were shopping together and they would talk and talk to each other about this obvious visual disturbance. Finally on one group of ladies who were talking amongst themselves about how they'd never seen a kid look like this before, I decided to butt in, "Yeah, isn't it really bizzarre? I can't believe that he's sleeping like this. It's a good thing my phone has a camera on it!" At this point they acknowledged my existance and said "YES. We've just never seen a kid throw his head back like that and stay asleep! It can't be comfortable! He must be very tired." And then I thought to myself, hmmm. If I hadn't slept well in 15 months (which I guess technically it's been longer than that for me if you count the end-of-pregnancy-sleeplessness, but....) I would probably be able to sleep like this child too! He's such a funny boy. It's so interesting how my two boys can be SOOO different from one another. Spencer is now climbing on everything, he thinks it's really funny to stop and look for my reaction and then continue his naughty behavior. The latest quest has been to scale the bars that separate our family room from the upper level/kitchen area. This picture was off my phone so I know it's not the best, but you get the idea.

I don't know if Santa should visit him this year! What do you think?