My daughter is sleeping as I write this. (Of course she is. Generally speaking, if she's not sleeping, I'm not writing.) We are, I believe and hope, about halfway through her morning nap, though she went to sleep a little later today than usual, around 9:20 instead of the holy and sleep-book-sanctioned hour of 9:00 a.m.

I could go on—and on and on and on—about the details of her naps, their variations and intricacies. I would, however, run the risk of making you as bored by this topic as I sometimes am, when I stop to think about it with the shrinking portion of my brain that is not engaged in the day-to-day aspects of mamadom, so I'll try to stop myself. (For the same reason, and also because it would be disgusting, I will also spare you a long discourse on the details of her excretory habits.)

Nora is currently five and a half months old, and she is really quite delightful: cheery, smiling, cooing like mad, and generally sweet. And she naps well, too: most days, if we're at home and no weird variations occur in her routine, she takes nice solid two-hour naps at 9:00 and 1:00, just like the book says she should when she's this age.

I feel like I should capitalize the word "book" in the above sentence. Sleep books and solutions, as every mother of an infant knows, proliferate on bookstore shelves (or Amazon recommendation pages, if, like me, you now do all your shopping online). And they have fierce partisans. We kind of fell into being a Weissbluth family, but somehow along the way we became nap fanatics. For those without young babies, he's the Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child guy—or, as we called it for a brief and chaotic interlude in our house, Nazi Sleep Habits, Crying Child. Don't get me wrong, he's not a strict cry-it-out guy by any means (indeed, we like the book in part because it gives you other options), but his book espouses the idea that there is definitely one way for your baby to nap: At home. In a crib. Above all, regularly and predictably.

We struggled to get to the point where Nora now naps in these ways most days (though sometimes, I confess, when we're going somewhere, she naps quite well in the car). If you'd told me when she was twelve weeks old that she would eventually fall into her lovely napping schedule, I would have looked at you in profound wonderment mingled with hopeful gratitude. The days she cried inconsolably, or woke up after 20 minutes, or napped at the wrong time or we didn't do our soothing-to-sleep routine (such as it is; it can basically be summed up by the word "nursing"), I would read the relevant sections of the Book over and over, like some kind of prayer incantation, wishing and hoping that Weissbluth would end up being right. If I read it, I thought, the naps would come.

Come they did, and once again I am learning to be careful what I wish for. Believe me, I'm not complaining (much), but what I hadn't reckoned on is the fact that when Nora is napping, Mama is in the house. I mean, in Nora's world Mama is always in da house, figuratively speaking, but when she's asleep I am housebound—though sometimes my husband stays while I dash out for an errand or two. I have to be quick, though, because if she wakes up from the nap and I'm not here with the almighty milk supply it is a very, very bad thing. And, of course, the Murphy's law of napping is that even if a baby naps perfectly at all the right times for three weeks solid, it is the one day on which you desperately need her to do it again (because you have a work deadline, Christmas-shopping emergency, post-surgical cat to pick up at the vet, or similar urgent business) on which she will wake, wailing and clingy and wide-eyed, at minute 25. So, most of the time, when she's asleep, here I am.

I don't have the Book to hand (it's in the room where Nora is napping, and if you think I'm going to go in and get it, well, you've never had a baby), but I recall just one short paragraph that deals with the question of how to deal with the trapped feeling of being in the house until the baby wakes up. The essence of its message, and I'm paraphrasing here, is, "Suck it up." And I mostly do. I've bought the other message, that a well-rested baby is worth it, hook, line, and sinker, because if the naps don't happen, a very cranky baby ensues, and that's no fun for anyone. As a consequence, certain things have gone by the boards, such as the mom and baby yoga classes we used to go to two or three mornings a week.

The classes fall right smack at naptime, and I just can't do it, much though it would benefit my aching back and sore shoulders. A few times, I've tried doing my dusty postpartum yoga DVD (the one that stayed in its shrinkwrap until Nora was well over four months old) as she sleeps, but I find that when I'm at home I see the piles of laundry, the unmade bed, the needing-to-be-vacuumed floor, and I find it hard to really get into a downward dog. Of course, I can't run the vacuum while the baby is napping, anyway, but I give up on everything and go check my email or try to get some work done. I don't understand how I can be spending so much time at home—with a fair amount of free time, even, thanks to the naps—and yet doing such an utterly terrible job of keeping the place clean.

Other things I've had to give up on include long morning naps (they work OK in the afternoon, as long as the afternoon nap ends at a reasonable time so that we can get out before it's dark), any midday errand lasting or with the potential to last more than one hour, including most lunches out, and the better part of each meeting of the new mothers' group I'm in. Our meetings start at 10:00, but most days Nora sleeps until 11:00, so I'm cooling my heels, then feeding her and racing around to get out the door and get to the meeting so that we arrive for the very tail end. If I'd had any idea how short the tote-her-anywhere phase would be—the time where she'd sleep equally blissfully at home or in a crowded bar—I would have taken her straight from the hospital to a movie theater. (Not really. At that stage, I needed a nap too.)

Granted, I could probably still tote her along. I've done it, on days when we're traveling or visiting old and seldom-seen friends or the like. We'd have a few meltdowns, some fussy spells, and eventual snatched bits of sleep in the car. But I'm a routine-loving kind of person myself, and one glance at Nora's smiling face when she wakes up from a nap (yes, sometimes she just smiles—though if I don't hop to it with the feeding, that smile turns into a scream right quick) pretty quickly convinces me that I need to keep up the nap routine. As it's evolved, it's less that we're enforcing a rigid schedule than that she has fallen into a pattern, and if we let her nap (rather than making her nap) at the times when those eyelids are drooping, she'll do it beautifully.

The predictability in our days can edge on mind-numbing sameness, especially when a December fog finally clears and I just want to go out and do something, anything, rather than be in my messy little house. Eventually, though, she always wakes up—and I can always go for that walk tomorrow, or summon a little extra discipline to do that yoga DVD. Right now, Nora needs to nap, and giving her the time and space to do it best—which for her is indeed regularly, predictably, and in her crib—is really the least of the changes I have to make to my life as a parent.