Before I became a parent, there were so many things that I saw other parents do that I SWORE I wouldn’t do when I had a kid of my own.

(Let’s all pause a moment while we laugh collectively.)

One of the “there’s no way in hell I’m doing that” items was: stick to a nap schedule so rigid that our days are planned around when our dear child needs his sleepy time. We laughed, we scoffed, we rolled our eyes at parents who would freak out at 1:04 because their child needed to nap at 1:00 and oh-my-god-we-have-to-get-home-because-precious-Johnny-needs-sleep.

Now, I totally get it. Because missed nap = potential for hellfire and brimstone to rain down upon us all. Those parents were only trying to spare us the agony of witnessing a catastropic event of Biblical proportions. And we had the balls to whisper and laugh behind their backs.

And last weekend, we officially morphed into “those parents.” On Saturday, my husband and I decided to take a drive out to a far suburb for lunch. In a perfectly timed universe, we would’ve left when we were supposed to, eaten lunch and gotten back within a couple hours. In reality, it took like thirty minutes to even get out of the driveway because leaving the house these days resembles a space shuttle launch between the Cheerio baggies, sippy cup pieces, travel wipes containers that always need to be re-filled and all the other crap that goes along with venturing into the outside world.

As we sat down to lunch, I realized it was naptime and started to sweat. I obsessively checked my watch and hovered over my child, convinced he was going to suddenly morph into a rabid, flesh-seeking zombie. Or at least a bratty toddler. But he was fine. (The fact that we let him suck on anything he wanted, including my credit card and a salt shaker, also helped.) We all survived despite a totally screwed up naptime.

I guess the moral of the story is that I should* withold judgement (and laughing, snickering, rolling of the eyes, etc) about other parents, since karma seems to have a pretty good sense of irony.

*”Should” does not mean “will.”

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