ah, naptime

{me + my brother johnny, asleep in the backseat, circa 1981}

full disclosure: i kind of love naps. and i always have. (born and bred on them actually...how do you think my mom raised four kids with only 6 years between the eldest {me} and the youngest {aaron} + stayed sane? NAPS. we were required to take a whole lotta naps.)

yesterday i was in the car with my friend meeghan. we chatted away as her three year old, justice, was crashed out in the backseat taking nap, the seatbelt stretched across the top of his torso and keeping him mostly upright. 

every few minutes he would startle, look up groggily and then his head would jerk once, twice in an attempt to hold his head up and stay awake. it was futile; his heavy head would drop, heavy lids close, and then he would once again give in and fall back asleep. his head was literally flopping down onto his chest. 

you know what i'm talking about- the inadvertent napping that happens on a plane, or in a car, or in a class, when you don't really intend to take a nap but it just happens?

car naps are my favorite. don't you remember falling asleep in the car as a kid, somewhere midway between home and your final destination? 

your body becomes one with the car: in my case, the embossed naugahyde bench seat of a ford fairmont station wagon. whichever three kids were in the backseat would sort of slowly lean into each other as we fell further and further asleep until we were slumped onto each other and a sweaty tangle of siblings. forget the fact that only moments before succumbing to dreamland we kids had been arguing over who was invading our alloted portion of space, who had poked who, and who had cheated playing car bingo. suddenly the most bitter of sibling wars abates, and you want to snuggle, or at least lean on the shoulder next to you. usually i sat in the middle, and inevitably i would be a jonathan and rebecca sandwich, as both of them would fall asleep on each of my shoulders and then i'd finally crash out, my head dropped forward onto my chest or sideways against one of their heads. i honestly think that most of our sibling squabbles were resolved by those car naptimes. seriously, it's kind of impossible to stay mad at your brother when you've been drooling on his forearm for 35 miles.

car naps end one of two ways: either by jerking awake as the car pulls up into the driveway lazily stretching yourself out of a sleepy stupor or, if it's nighttime, with mom or dad scooping you up, snuggling your limp deadweight body against theirs and carrying you into bed. 

i think on my list of things that i miss from childhood, car naps may be close to the top. car naps and reading little house on the prairie books on a saturday afternoon.