The big girl bed

So N has been exiting her crib at will starting in around late June/early July. She never had much reason to do it because one of us would stay in her room with her to avoid major-league freak outs. She wasn't secure with us leaving. Then, on the Monday after her birthday in mid-July, I put her in her crib for her nap and then quickly left the room to get something. I expected her to be either half out of her crib or coming out the door of her room by the time I returned, but she wasn't. She was sitting in her crib looking through her books, blissfully okay with my absence. So I left the room again. When I returned a minute later, she was still doing just fine. So then I left the room again, left her door open, and sat in the living room very quietly. After a few minutes she noted my absence and called for me a little. I went in and said, "Night-night, N". She said, "Night-night, Mama". And then I left the room. And she was fine. She babbled for a bit. When she would start saying mamamamamama I would say, from the living room, "Night-night, N" and I would hear her sweet little voice: "Night-night, Mama".

Then she fell asleep.

So as an experiment, I did the same thing that night. It worked.

In shock, we sat in the living room at 8:30pm, both of us, slightly freaking out over the life-changing potential of no longer needing to camp out on a mattress in her room until she fell asleep twice a day. The freedom, people! The freedom!

There have been bumps in the road. She isn't always in the mood to go to bed when we want her to. There have been some definite hiccups in the sleep routine. There were a few nights a couple of weeks ago where she just screamed and cried in her most dramatic fashion and did everything she could to finagle a way out of her room because she wanted to play and not go to bed until midnight. Once we figured out she really wasn't hungry and she really wasn't traumatized, we stuck to our guns and after one excruciating bedtime she seemed to get the gist of going to bed again. We close her door completely because her room is so close to the living room and then we enjoy some child-free time together. It's been life-changing. It's also wonderful to know that she is secure enough now in the knowledge that we are still there and will come to her when she needs us.

She wasn't always ready to go to sleep, though, even after wanting to be tucked in. She would just throw her pillow out of her crib, crawl out and take the room apart, and then pass out on her pillow or on the floor. C had been travelling for work and working late hours when he was home and we never found time to change her crib over to a toddler bed. Thankfully she is a rather advanced climber and we didn't need to worry about her falling. She is a total monkey. But I wanted her to be able to get back in bed after playtime.

One day I went in to check on her during her nap and found her like this.

It was normal to have to put all the diapers away after every naptime since we keep them in a bin in her changing table. She had gotten into the lotion and baby powder on her changing table, thankfully without a major mess, so those are now kept on her bathroom counter where she can't get to them. This time when I went to put her in her crib I moved Lovey Bunny and found that she had scaled her changing table again and gotten into the wipes.

All of the wipes.

Now we put the wipes away every time she goes down for a nap or bedtime.

Then, two Sundays ago, we put the toddler front onto her crib and now she has a Big Girl Bed. She can tear up her room and then get back into bed instead of crashing on her pillow on the floor.

We've been working on trying to establish regular nap/bedtimes. I'm just not a schedule person, so that has been really hard for me to do, but I'm determined to stick to the new schedule as much as possible. We'll see how it goes.