Big Bed!

Ashlyn is rocking her big bed. For the past 3 weeks I can't remember once that she's gotten out of bed without permission. Yahoo! But this wasn't always the case! The following is an account of our big bed story..... it is pretty boring but if you're hard up for reading material, here ya go!

We decided in August to get her going on a big bed! She was growing so tall she could barely stretch out in her crib. Plus I just wanted to get going on the transition so it was overwith by the time the holidays and all that craziness came around. We were originally going to just go straight from the crib to the big bed. I didn't really care about all the "slow transitions" that are often encouraged. Our plan was to get a big bed at IKEA while we were in Utah in July. Well BOO, the only bed we wanted was out of stock! So scratch that. Then we just forgot about bed shopping for a few weeks with the craziness of Collin going back to school. But meanwhile I really still wanted to get going on this. So, we decided we would have to at least start with the whole "slow transition" thing. Her crib is convertible all the way up to a twin, but we just did the toddler bed step. Which was really just taking the side railing off. I was worried about her rolling out so we bought a side guard and put that on too. So basically it was still a crib.... but with a tiny opening for her to climb in and out. Here she is her first night in that:

 That step went ok. For the first week or so she definitely had to get used to the fact that she had to stay in bed because we told her to. Nap time was pretty rough, actually. There were 2 or 3 days that she never slept and instead COMPLETELY trashed her room. This picture is one of the times I found it the cleanest:

And one night I heard her calling my name and trying to open the door at 2:30am so I went in and found her room completely, completely trashed, with the lights on and everything. I got her back in bed and thought I settled her down, but after I left her room and then went to the bathroom....when I was walking back down the hallway I saw her light on again!! So then I went in and told her sternly to get in bed. Boy did she cry. But she didn't get out of bed again in the night anyways. A few mornings I went in to find her sitting near her books reading, which I thought was cute.

She got way better, and so I thought the next step would be to take that guard rail off. That went HORRIBLE. She would not stay in bed at either nap or bed time. But naps were especially horrible. This was Collin's first week back to school, which meant the first week of it back to being just me and Ashlyn home together all day. It was one of the worst weeks I had all year!! Ashlyn was a horrible stinker to me all week. It may have been due to the transition of Daddy being gone again....but I really think it was mostly because she wasn't sleeping. I don't think she took a nap once that week, and she was out of bed every night. We were both emotional wrecks and at each other's throats by the end of the week!! She was in time out more than I want to count that week! So anyway, we decided to put the guard rail back up, but to actually get on the ball with finding a bed.

We shopped craigslist for a couple of weeks, and then finally found a decent bed frame out in Nampa for cheap. It needed a fresh coat of spray paint but that was no problem. Then my parents were so awesome to donate a mattress....and I absolutely love shopping for bedding so that was fun! We let Ashlyn help with taking down her crib and putting it in the garage, and then with setting up her new bed, and tried to get her excited about it. She really just didn't seem to care either way. The bed is high enough off the ground that it takes some work for her to climb in....and therefore it's not a big temptation to climb out either. Yay! She has done super great ever since we got the big bed. Kind of makes me think it probably would have gone that well if we had just done this in the first place. But oh well, things worked out like they did probably so I could write this and you could learn what not to do! ha ha! Here she is just hanging out in her "cozy bed" as she calls it:

Yeah, I know. She is pretty much too cute. It's sad but fun to see her in a big bed like this now. And there you go, our bed story!
THE END!