Jeff:
Fun question for today comes from our community. This is Valerie Hayes. Valerie, how are you doing? We love you guys. We always are seeing you around our community and homeroom and family teams. So great question by the way, from your guys as team. Let’s see if we can help you here.

How do you sync up nap times with an infant and a toddler? How long of a grace period do you give yourself to transition as a new team member is added to the squad?

Great question. I’ll have Jeremy answer this one since he probably can remember from 20 years ago.

Jeremy:
Help me, Jeff.

Jeff:
Yeah, exactly. No, I’ll try to answer this from our perspective and I’d love to just hear your advice on just the philosophy of it and stuff like that, Jeremy. But yeah, so it sounds like what I’m hearing is you guys added kid number two and kid number two now is baby. You have a toddler. How do you kind of dance? Because the hardest place to be in as a family is what I’m hearing you say, you don’t want to be is when like the toddler schedules opposite of the baby’s schedule and you’re just like basically just revolving door of naps and snacks and all that.

So I do think we, this is not a law. This is not gospel but I think for us, we try really hard to get, because this is about family sustainability and if you want to have a bigger family team than you really need sustainability. So for us, we have a high value of like getting the kids, the newer members of the family, into a similar schedule as everyone else. Right? And making sure that the toddlers stay on a certain schedule.

So now our, our kids don’t have, I think they usually stop napping around, I don’t know, three or something like that but we still do what we call quiet time and it’s actually not even quiet time. It’s like they can talk and all that. They just have to stay in the room. They got to clean it up when it’s done. They’ve got to obey, listen, all that stuff and be kind of imaginative and color and play.

So I would say, give yourself… The second question is give yourself a lot of grace because the worst thing you want to do is force something so heavy handed that it begins to hurt some hearts and begins to hurt just natural rhythms.

So I think pay attention to natural rhythms of kids. One, if you are working backwards, maybe one tip, I would say is the baby is more biological. So let the baby kind of like put that into the biological rhythm, of course, within what you want to try to hopefully obtain and then allow the toddler to bend more. That’s what if that makes sense, of like, “Oh, Hey. Baby’s napping right now. I think this is a really good time that we’re going to try to have some imaginative play or Lego time or book reading time or read aloud time, et cetera.”

So that’s what I would say and that’s the easiest way, I think that we’ve done it, is kind of work backwards from baby schedules, if you are working backwards, but I don’t know Jeremy, if you would add anything there?

Jeremy:
No, that’s really good, man. It has been a long time before we’ve had a sync those up.

I would say too, the bigger picture level, what you were saying, that what we’re trying to do, you guys philosophically is we’re trying to introduce each child into the family team where they are. We’re all orbiting the family and none of us are orbiting just the individual and obviously when the infant’s really little, there’s a lot of accommodation we make for infants, but as they’re getting a little older and they become a little more trainable or especially when they’re toddlers, like I love what you were saying, Jeff, is like at that stage, they should be able to flex and if a family member really needs to be really careful with their schedule, like a newborn baby, then it’s important that the toddler be prepared for that kind of transition.

But I would definitely say sync these up as early as you can. Sync your toddler up to one of the nap times of the baby, as soon as possible. Sometimes that’s the afternoon. Oftentimes babies take two or three naps a day and so you just want to sync up probably that afternoon nap as quickly and as well as you can.

But I would… that’s a great question, Valerie and I think this is a really, really important thing to keep in mind.