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31-Day Challenge

Day Sixteen: The Last Time You Treated Yourself to a Day Nap

Napping during the day is my idea of a day spa.

Karen Schwartz
3 min readJan 16, 2023

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Karolina Grabowska on Pexels

New mothers, please don’t hate me. I know where you’re at, and it can be brutal. Despite needing ten to twelve hours of sleep in my younger years, studying for exams and raising infants forbade it. What if we could set our children as alarm clocks going off at our hour of choosing? That would be nice, but babies are sleep-stealers. That’s why God invented naps.

When my first child was born, I slept whenever she slept. Gone was the time to focus on household chores or making meals. If the baby was dreaming, so was I. That is until the second and third child came along, and things like driving carpool took precedence. Once daytime naps became obsolete, I became one cranky Karen. But we do what we must. And begging for sleep time wasn’t beneath me.

As an adult with adult children, I still love taking naps. It’s my time to decompress from an otherwise stressful day. But I must be careful. A nap in the day often jeopardizes my nightly sleep schedule. If I grab a snooze after work before dinner, I risk getting to bed too late or waking wide-eyed in the middle of the night. So, how is a nap even helpful?

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Karen Schwartz
Karen Schwartz

Written by Karen Schwartz

Children's picture book author, fiction writer, personal essayist, kindness specialist, and lover of chocolate.

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