Toddler Beds: Day One

Rich and I converted the girls' cribs to "big girl" beds on Sunday morning. Emily and Anna love to sleep with 10,000 stuffed animals and dolls in their cribs so I removed most of those and had them neatly piled into a small chair in the room. There is also a book shelf in their room with more dolls and stuffed animals.

We brought the girls up for nap a little later than usual, around 1:30, hoping that if they were tired enough, they would at least lie down long enough to potentially drift off to sleep. Yeah....

The "new" beds were met with a round of "oooohs" and "ahhhhhs" from the girls and they immediately began to demonstrate for us how they could easily climb in. And climb out. And climb in. And climb out. You get the picture. Then Anna and Em, with Allie's help, proceeded to fill their cribs with all of their "missing" lovies. Anna would run over to Em and say, "Here's your zebra, Emmie. He's back."

Anna



Em after saying, "There's no room for me!"



There is other furniture in their room but they have never climbed on it so we kept our fingers crossed with that. We did leave their door open as they usually insist upon it. There was a doorstop wedged under it and they are unable to open their closet doors with the baby proofing.

Random picture of Em hugging Allie, who was pretending to being Baby and crawling around.

They did not nap. As I suspected. We have a small bureau out in the hall (for now) that contains all of their socks, tights and underwear. All three congregated out in the hall to play dress-up instead of resting or sleeping. As Rich and I were climbing the stairs to assess the damage, Allie held up a pair of underwear and said, "This is really pretty, Mommy. Look at all of the colors."

Here was their attempt to clean up.

Bed time rolled around and we had three very tired toddlers on our hands. They were tucked into their beds at 7:15 and Rich stayed for another five minutes telling them stories. They LOVE for us to tell them stories. All I hear all day is, "Talk to me about a story," or "Tell me a story, Mommy." As soon as he left, they started climbing out of the beds. We decided to leave them be, knowing that they were exhausted. Within five minutes, Emily started screaming that she was stuck. I ran up the stairs to find her sitting in her bed with both legs stuck through the slats of the bed rail. It took a bit of finagling to free her.

I told her that she needed to stay in bed, lying down, to avoid further injury. She plopped down without argument and I left. Within five minutes, we could hear more running around upstairs so Rich went back up. He decided to hang out in their room for a few minutes. Anna did not care who was there and made the move to leave her bed. Emily said to her, "Anna, wait for Daddy to leave." So yes, they do know exactly what they are doing.

Rich did leave and almost immediately, I heard someone in the hall saying, "Shhhhhh," not very quietly while her sisters laughed. A few minutes later, I heard Anna screaming from the upstairs hallway that she is stuck. I ran up to find that she had some fingers wedged into an area of the hall gate where two bars overlap. She wasn't really stuck. What was interesting about that trip upstairs was that Emily had stayed in her bed and Allie only jumped out when she heard me come up the stairs.

I escorted Anna back to her crib and told her (along with reminding Em) that they need to stay put to avoid injury. It worked. They were all sound asleep within minutes. So total time between tucking in and falling asleep was twenty minutes.

Rich and I thought we were in the clear until a bit after 10:00 last night when Anna woke up coughing and crying which set off Allie and Em. I should back up and explain that Anna seemed to be a bit congested in her nose yesterday but she didn't have a runny nose. Every once in a while she would cough and it sounded a bit phlegmy. It took us about 45 minutes to soothe Allie and Em back to sleep. Anna never did fall back asleep but I had planned to bring her downstairs to sleep anyway so that she wouldn't wake up her sisters and I could check on her through out the night.

Interestingly, no one attempted to scoot out of the beds during that incident and Allie and Em stayed put all night. Even after they awakened this morning, they waited until they heard the hall gate click open before they left their beds.

So all in all, it wasn't that bad.