The Drive, and the Nap That Actually Happened
2026-08-03 · Warren, founder of Hey Susan · 4 min
This is a personal story, not medical advice. Every baby's rhythm is different, and what worked for our day trip is not a formula for yours. If you're planning something similar, the timing that matters most is your own kid's, not a blog post's. This post also references research on infant sleep and parental mood — if you're struggling with your own mood or stress as a parent, please talk to your own doctor, not a blog post. (We've also written about postpartum anxiety symptoms and when to get help.)
For the first few months, "let's go somewhere" filled me with a specific kind of dread. Not because I didn't want to go. Because I knew we'd spend the morning guessing: is he going to nap in the car or fight it the whole way, is he going to be starving by the time we get there, are we going to end up standing in a parking lot bouncing a screaming baby while the thing we drove out to see happens without us. We'd done that version of the day before. Nobody enjoyed it.
The day that finally worked, we didn't plan around the destination. We planned around him.
He was up around 7, 7:30, same as most mornings. We didn't rush him through breakfast, we just worked backward from the window we actually cared about, and had him fed, dressed, and in the car seat by 8:30. The drive out was 30 to 45 minutes, which put us right in the stretch where he's alert and fine in the car but not yet due for anything, so no crying, no last-minute pullover. We got there about 9:15.
From 9:15 to somewhere around 10:30, 11, we hiked. He was awake for it, strapped to my chest for most of it, occasionally pointing at nothing in particular like it was the most interesting nothing he'd ever seen. We fed him around 10:30, 11, right in that window, sitting on a rock with a view that was nice but honestly secondary to the fact that he was calm and fed and we weren't watching the clock with our stomachs in knots.
Then the drive back. This was the part I used to dread most, the long stretch home with an overtired baby, and instead it was the easiest hour of the day: he was due for a nap right around when we started driving, and he was out within a few minutes of the car moving. We picked up lunch on the way, ate it in the car while he slept, and by the time we got home he was waking up on his own, well rested, ready for actual free time instead of the meltdown-then-recovery cycle we'd had before. The whole day cost us almost none of the stress the earlier ones had, and the only thing different was that we'd built it around his clock instead of ours.
I went looking afterward for whether this was a real thing or just a good day, and it turns out it's fairly well established. The AAP notes that consistent routines around wake times, meals, and naps help a child feel secure, and the same predictability that helps at home is portable, it travels with you, which is really what we'd stumbled into that day. There's also research connecting infant sleep and cry problems to how the parents themselves are doing. A randomized controlled trial of a behavioral infant sleep intervention found that resolving infants' sleep problems was linked to improved maternal mood, with the largest drop in depression symptoms among the mothers who started out most affected. Separately, a cross-sectional study of toddlers (not infants, and it can't establish which way the effect runs) found that problematic bedtime routines were associated with more parental stress, while more paternal involvement at bedtime was linked to fewer night wakings — the authors describe it as a two-way relationship, not a proven one. None of that is about day trips specifically. But it points at the same mechanism: know the rhythm, work with it instead of against it, and everyone has an easier day, us included.
The annoying part is that knowing the rhythm and actually building a day plan around it are two different jobs, and the second one used to fall entirely on me, mental math on a car ride the night before, working backward from a nap window I was half-guessing at anyway. That's the part we've been building into Hey Susan. The "Hey PlanforMe!" feature is meant to take Susan's own nap and feed predictions and push them straight onto your Google Calendar as actual blocks, so a day like ours isn't something you architect from scratch in your head, it's just already sitting there when you open your calendar. I'll be straight with you: it's not turned on for everyone yet, we're still finishing the work of making sure it's solid before we open it up beyond our own household. When it is, I'll say so plainly here instead of overselling it now.
If you want the story that comes before this one, I wrote about the day he was born — "The Day He Was Born" — the ninety minutes right after, and why I built a place to hold onto memories like that before they blur. This one's really a sequel to it in spirit: the same kid, a lot more predictable now, and a dad who finally stopped dreading the drive.
Get the Hey Susan app
Hey Susan runs in our iOS and Android app. Download it to your phone to chat with Susan and track your little one.
Free to download on iPhone & Android.
