Big Steps!

Well, my little Abigail has officially started sleeping in a big girl toddler bed! It all started with her asking to get on our bed and get "under the covers" a lot recently. She really seemed to like pretending to sleep like a big girl! Then I saw a friend post a funny picture of where her son {who is a couple months younger than Abigail} wound up during a nap. It made me start to wonder if it was time to transition to a toddler bed, although I had previously thought I would keep her in her crib til she was like five so I wouldn't have to deal with anything that comes with not having your child contained in a baby jail!

(This was the best I could get before she got up!)

So Tuesday night we hung out upstairs while I took one side off of her crib. We don't have a guard rail or anything, but her crib is like, 6 inches off the ground so I think she would be OK if she fell out. Anyway, we started bedtime like usual, reading a couple books in the rocking chair, then I put her in her bed. She cried and reached out for me with her little sad face and said "yeeesss???" over and over, which is what she does when she is sad and wants to be held. I sat down next to the bed to try to read her another story with her IN the bed to make her feel better, but she climbed out into my lap. We read a couple more books, she calmed down and I put her back in bed and told her she needed to stay in her bed like a big girl. She cried a little more as I was walking out of her room, but she finished fussing after about 10 minutes. {I had the monitor on so I could hear if she got up and did anything} She woke up briefly one time around 4am, cried some, and went back to sleep. This wasn't too out of the ordinary, she would wake up and cry every once in a while before this. She sleeps terribly, like her daddy.

When I went to get her the next morning, she had a baby doll in her bed that I am pret-ty sure I didn't put in her bed the night before. I know she had her stuffed lamb, and her stuffed moose, but I think she must've gotten up and gotten her baby at some point!

The true challenge came at naptime, I ended up having to do a similar routine to our bedtime routine. Before, whenever she got sleepy enough, I would just take her upstairs and put her in the crib. Sometimes she would protest, but she would go to sleep really quickly because there really wasn't anything else to do in the crib! Now it is a little trickier, because she can get up and shake the door knob and yell "momma??" Breaks my heart! I thought maybe she would just play a bit, realize she was tired and couldn't get out of her room, and crawl in her bed and go to sleep. Negative! So after two rounds of her calling down to me, I read her some books in my lap next to her bed like we did the night before. I put her back in her bed and told her to stay there, and she cried again, but was done by the time I got downstairs. All this crying makes a mommy sad! But I know I will thank myself down the road when she's not trying to spend every night in OUR bed. {I really need my space when I'm sleeping, so it's hard enough already sharing my bed with my giant husband who has no awareness that I am even in the bed once he's sleeping!} I love co-sleeping with my babies, but at the same time I am counting down the days til I will night-wean my little Bubba and I can sleep on my own again!

So that's our experience so far, and it has been pretty manageable! Much easier than I thought it would be, actually! Anyone else transitioning now, or in the near future? Or have any fun stories from when you transitioned your kid?

P.S. I have made a tiny bit of progress on the website, updating a couple of the graphics, but I still have a long ways to go!