Parenting dilemmas not forseeable

I'm still struggling what to do with naptime on Thursdays. Thursday is, for the uninitiated, the very important highlight day of the week when the garbage truck comes. The garbage truck first comes anywhere from 2 to 2:30 and makes a second trip down our street about five to ten minutes later to pick up trash cans on the other side of the street.

Normally Jolly goes down for his 2 hour plus (or very occasionally minus) 20 minute nap around 12:30 pm. And Jolly's nap scheduling is pretty flexible - naptime can be initiated can be shifted by an hour or so without major detrimental impact on the run of the rest of the day. So, you'd think that we'd be all set. 

Alas, if we try to put Jolly down at noon on a Garbage Truck Day, he wakes up when a neighbor starts their lawnmower or a noisy pickup drives down the street. Commence sobbing "WANT TO SEE THE MUELLABFUR [garbage truck]!, with child so upset that his clenched little toddler fists are shaking. Normally, noon-time naps work fine. He's also normally a very sound sleeper, but knowing that the nap will be ended by the garbage truck coming basically throws him into a very fitful state where he's only dozing and mostly waiting to hear the garbage truck lest he miss it. And once he's had this major "that was the garbage truck and I missed it" meltdown, then the only solution is to sit quietly on the front steps holding him for half an hour reassuring him that the garbage truck is still going to come, until the garbage truck finally arrives.

Keeping track of garbage truck days is something that is probably going to be solely responsible for Jolly eventually learning the days of the week, plus, it's pretty obvious because the trash gets set out, so it's not something I could even hide if I wanted to. Also, I'm not going to lie to my kid when he asks, as he asks EVERY SINGLE DAY, whether he can see the garbage truck today. Honesty is hard sometimes (see also Santa Claus) but I think it's a core part of the parenting philosophy that Ephiny and I agree very strongly on. 

So far, the thing that's worked best is having a very busy morning scheduled to put off the naptime (baking! finger painting! going shopping! etc!) and then at 2, going outside with a stack of garbage-truck themed books from the library and quietly reading them under the apple trees until the garbage truck finally arrives. Then, we can say hello to the garbage truck and the driver as he picks up our trash, read another book (emphasizing that it is the very last one before nap!), and then it comes by again and we can say good-bye and wish the driver a nice weekend as he picks up the across-the-street-neighbor's trash and then immediately go inside while singing the usual bedtime song and go STRAIGHT to bed (with the toy garbage truck, naturally).

This means nap is sometimes starting after when it's would usually be ending, but it seems to be more effective than the alternative, so I think we might have found the best solution, short of the trash people rearranging their schedule so they come either earlier or later in the day. 

I would like to acknowledge that this situation is totally borne of the fact that we live in a very very quiet rural setting where we have a conversation about nearly every vehicle that goes down the street (or through our airspace). Jolly usually points out what kind of vehicle it sounds like ahead of time, and then if we see it going by he talks about the color or size of the vehicle and confirms or updates his classification of the vehicle as a car/trailer/package delivery truck/pickup truck/garbage truck. Another way to quantify how rarely we have traffic is that cars passing our house happens rarely enough to allow bigger kids to play sports in the street like in all the old-timey children's books. In nearly any other setting, our very quiet garbage truck would never ever be capable of being distinguished from the background noise of traffic. Thus, I know this is the most ridiculously privileged parenting dilemma to be having.

But what's also noteworthy is that "how do I best incorporate the trash collection schedule into our naptime routine" is not a parenting problem I expected having to face. It would never have occurred to me that my schedule would revolve so critically around trash-pick-up days! (And I never thought that I would know, without any shadow of doubt and without having to peek at the neighbors, whether it is a recycling pick-up week. Recycling happens every other Thursday with a SECOND, totally separate garbage truck, happily well before naptime.)

So, I am grateful to Jolly for being such a fun person with such passionate (if slightly bizarre) interests in the world around him... and I am also super-curious to see what our next kid will come up with in terms of totally crazy stuff that is well outside the realm of the parenting books.