The Downside to Will's Bed
(or my excuse to finally post a video on the blog)

Will's bed is awesome. We were originally thinking about designing and building a bunk bed when Dad and Lee visited back in July. However, when Dad and Lee were taking Will for a walk to Starbucks, they found a perfect bunk bed, free to a good home, just a couple of blocks away from us. So Dad and Dan re-finished it, we got mattresses, and it is now set-up in Will's room. Perfect for the plan of the two boys sharing the same room until one of them decides to move out.

A bit ago, we started putting Will in his bed for naps. This worked well. Then we started putting him in his bed for nighttime. As he is kind of big for his portable crib, this gave him a lot more space to move around at night. Plus he is able to sleep with about 10 stuffed animals now whereas in his crib he was limited to more like 1 or 2.

Will has learned how to climb in and out of the bed pretty well. This is good because it is an indicator that he is ready to sleep in it. However, we have found two problems with this. First, if he wakes up really early, like 6:30am, he can get out of bed. If we haven't closed the door to his room, he will wander over to our room and wake me up. Fortunately he can't jump up on our bed, he just taps me and says, "mom-mom-mom-mom." I like closing his door, but it can get pretty cold in there as our heater is just outside in the hallway.

Will Getting In and Out of Bed

The second problem is that if Will gets out of bed in the middle of the night, he gets confused since he is still mostly asleep. Then he has trouble getting back into bed or realizing that he needs to get back into bed. Unfortunately we aren't the lucky parents who wake in the morning to find their child curled up with his blanket peacefully sleeping on the floor. Nope, he makes us remedy the situation immediately and get him back up into bed. This causes Dan to be unable to fall back asleep which in turn causes me to have trouble falling back asleep.

We are working on these issues. If Will gets out of bed immediately after we put him there and shut the door, he might come over and knock on the door. However, if we tell him to get back into bed, he usually does this on his own as he is still fully awake during this time. We are hoping that this action of going back into bed will get stuck in his head and that he will learn to do it even when he is asleep.