My daughter did not take a nap today.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, mind you. We put her in her room just shy of one o’clock. We didn’t let her out until around three o’clock. It’s just that during the intervening two hours she didn’t sleep. Instead she tore apart her room, played with her toys, and yelled down her catch phrases like: “I wake up!” and “Daddy? Daddy! I never take a coffee break right now!”

At one point she said something over the monitored that sounded suspiciously like “I peed”. We’ve had some diaper-related issues the past few weeks, so hearing that phrase coming out of my daughters mouth is troubling. I dropped the pretense of ignoring my daughter during her coffee break and ran upstairs.

I found that she hadn’t peed. She was actually sitting just on the other side of the gate that held her in her room.

She looked up at me as I approached. In her hands she held one of the tiny volumes from her Nutshell Library. She held it up to me through the slots in the gate and said:

“I give you fifty dollars.”

I don’t know where exactly she learned the concept of bribery, or even what fifty dollars was. But there she was, trying her hardest to get out of napping early.

As my toddler obviously doesn’t have fifty dollars, she stayed in her room.