Toddler Beds & Bliss

Last night was the first night D-man slept down­stairs.  We set up a loft style bed in Mamacita’s room from IKEA, it is designed to allow a mat­tress or small tod­dler bed to fit under­neath it.  The best use of the small room.  We moved the tod­dler bed under it after we put it up a cou­ple weeks ago.  But we didn’t move D-man to it that day.  Instead we let him explore it, got Mamacita comfy with her new bed arrange­ment & took things slow.

The week lead­ing up to last night made us say IT IS TIME.

D-man woke up con­stantly. We felt like the walk­ing dead over this last week.  The lack of sleep was get­ting to us.

He has NEVER been a great sleeper. We’d get a day here or there, but noth­ing ever con­sis­tent.  Yet, on our fam­ily trip he slept in the same room with Mamacita & we noticed some­thing after the first night of him adjust­ing to the new space he SLEPT.  Not a full night, but more than he had at home.

At home it’s been any time we get up, he gets up and at some point in the night each of us is going to get up to use the bath­room, unless we’re try­ing to cre­ate a water bed affect.  How­ever, with D-man get­ting up every 10 min­utes, scream­ing & throw­ing a set of tantrums that caused both Heaven & Hell to run for cover we decided it was time to give the new sleep­ing arrange­ment a try.

Wait, let me be more accu­rate.  Mike decided it was time & acted upon it.  I decided it was time & when it came to tuck­ing all the kids into their beds I started to chicken out.  Even though ear­lier in the day I told him it HAD to hap­pen THAT night or I was run­ning away.  Not for good, just for a long nap.

See, I get ideas in my head & no mat­ter how much sense they make to fol­low through on when it comes to act I panic.  I chicken out.  I have anx­i­ety set in that over­whelms me.  I’ve always had dif­fi­culty with this but after the whole PPD break­ing down it seems like I sec­ond guess myself more.  I didn’t think it was pos­si­ble for me to be MORE neu­rotic, but appar­ently I was wrong.  Oh, how I was wrong.

Still, sleep called to me.

So we stuck to the plan.  More impor­tantly Mike stuck to the plan & offered the idea that I could cud­dle D-man to sleep.  He also reminded me that if it didn’t work out we could change the plan.  Darn him for being rational.

With that we both D-man tucked into his new lit­tle bed.  Then I laid down with him for a lit­tle bit.  I for­got how uncom­fort­able fit­ting a grown-up body into a teeny tiny tod­dler bed can be.  And as I laid there crum­pled into the world’s small­est bed, with Mamacita above us ask­ing ques­tions every 5 sec­onds & D-man try­ing to get me to smell his feet I couldn’t help but laugh.  I’m sure we looked ridicu­lous, BUT he did stay in his bed AND he did sleep in it.

Although he woke up around 2am it was the ONLY time he woke up (he got more sleep too!) with­out a tantrum just a “Hey guys I’m up” kinda announce­ment.  Up enough to not fall back to sleep on his own, but not enough to cause sheer ter­ror.  Hubby brought him upstairs with us & he spent the last few hours upstairs with us.

This means instead of the 4–5 hours of sleep Mike & I had been get­ting (which was an improve­ment over the 3 we use to get) we got  7 hours (since we were able to fall asleep around 10 pm) even with us wak­ing up at 2 am & get­ting extra cud­dle time in with D-man. That’s SEVEN HOURS!!  Can you believe it?!  Seven bliss­ful hours of sleep.

Tagged as: baby, moving beds, sleep, toddler, toddler bed