Nap

The good thing -OK, one of a cornucopia of good things- about your child's nap is that it re-sensitizes you to the value of the pause.

Which is a plus, because we haven't really done well by the pause lately, we humans.  Yes, we have an unprecedented ability to bend life to our timetable- we can hit the pause button on our streaming TV, or whatever it is we've DVRed. But what do we use our "pauses" for?  Usually to check our phones or otherwise busify ourselves.  And we're increasingly intolerant of the enforced pauses- the train delays, the long lines, or, God forbid, the buffering.

The nap is a gift. It, too, can become a race to accomplish ALL THE THINGS- or at least ALL THE THINGS that are better done without a twenty-pound, inept miniature human hanging off of you. 

But it can also be a pause in the truest sense of that word- a brief hitch in forward momentum, when all you can do is stare at the wall and think-

*phew*