Pain-free transition out of afternoon Nap

One of the things I've never understood is why some people let their children give up their afternoon naps, but don't institute a rest time.  I honestly feel sorry for them.    Don't they get tired of having a small person bouncing off the walls all day long and talking/screaming non-stop?  Perhaps their children are different from my children.
When you have a child who is spending the morning cutting their own hair (Natalie, last week), climbing bookcases (Natalie, yesterday), trying to sneak food by sticking their fingers on the cutting board when I'm chopping (Natalie, two days ago), trying to help me cook by pushing the stool over to the hot oven (Natalie, yesterday), biting siblings (Natalie, all summer), filling the cups too full of water and then spilling it - repeatedly (Kenna and Natalie, all week - they learned how to access the cold water in the fridge),  you need a break.  Not to mention, those girls impede homeschooling like nothing else - and having two peaceful hours every afternoon in which to spend time with my older children is NECESSARY.

So what do you do when they repeatedly don't need to take naps (darn it!)?  You put them in their rooms anyway and get them up at the appointed time.

I've learned the hard way that kids who are transitioning will often still fall asleep, usually towards the end of the nap period.  If you let them sleep, they sleep too late and then won't go to bed on time.  Kenna tries to do this to me frequently.  The trick with her is to just wake her up at the appointed time and hope for the best.  She doesn't usually wake up well, but I have things like popsicles to help her out of her funk. (FYI - these molds are amazing because you can stick whatever the little ones don't finish back in the freezer!)  Natalie either falls right to sleep and sleeps a solid two hours, or she plays happily in her room for the entire two hours.  That happiness usually involves tearing up one of her books, but I'm careful which ones I let her have access too, and it's a small price to pay for a peaceful afternoon.

My kids have rest time until they are old enough to leave me alone if I let them stay up.

I guess that sounds like I don't enjoy spending time with my kids.

I do.

I just have certain things that I HAVE to get done during the day that I need a quiet house for.  Things like making business phone calls (I can't STAND having someone yelling when I'm on the phone with the bank), schooling older kids (especially when we do messy art projects), bill-paying and checkbook-balancing, eating ice cream from my secret stash (wait, did I say that out loud?), and generally gearing up for the marathon that my later afternoons/evenings have turned into.

Kenna decided that she was too big for nap-time and rest-time, so we changed the title to "quiet reading time" and she goes happily to sleep in her bed.

Lovely.