Crash

Nap time is super important, both for daddy and for the kids. I've always tried to keep a strict nap schedule. I think this does two things. First, it conditions their little bodies to sleep at the same time every day, which is an actual thing that works. Second, they never get to question whether there is nap or not. There is. There always is. My son used to tell me that he didn't want to take a nap. I'd always let him know that was fine, he didn't have to want to take a nap, but he had to take one anyway. I'd probably make a great prison warden.
Sometimes you have a very busy morning and the napper wanders off and puts themselves to sleep. This would happen every now and again when I was washing dishes after lunch. I'd get things washed and turn off the water only to be greeted by a ominous silence. Time to find the baby. Sometimes they'd be into something and would be trying to be sneaky, but just as often they would have wandered off and found someplace soft and warm. They just crashed.

Book finished this week:
Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel - Julia Keller
Richard Gatling's terrible marvel is of course the Gatling gun. Not the world's first machine gun, but the first that actually worked. It worked so well that we're still using the same basic weapon today in cases where you need to fire thousands of rounds a minute. It's as terrible and terrifying as it ever was, but what about the man who invented it? What kind of man lent his name to such a gun? An inventor, a business man, someone who watched the civil war unfold and thought that a functioning repeating gun could actually shorten the war. If two or three men could man a weapon so terrible that it would force the other side to view the outcome only one way, then he would save lives. The book covers more than that though, it covers the change in the United States from the agrarian pre-civil war to the eve of the first world war. The changes and motivations of the people and that time are as interesting as the gun itself. In fact, the book covers very very little of the gun other than the fact that it was invented, marketed, and how it was used. The technical details of the weapon are much less important than the fact that it worked, and it worked to shape the world. Interesting book.