Big Girl Bed

We greeted the month of September with an exciting change in our household. Vivi's room now contains a big girl bed-- and she is happily sleeping in it!

We ordered the bed a couple of weeks ago and when we looked at it in the showroom, it didn't look very big. It's a twin bed but because it doesn't require a box spring, it is quite a bit lower to the ground than a typical bed. When we got it set up in Vivi's room, however, it looked huge and when she climbed into it, she looked so much like a baby that I actually reconsidered whether I was ready for this transition.

Still, she was so excited and napped without incident in it that first afternoon. Her first night, I offered her the choice of sleeping in her crib or her bed. She looked at the bed and said, "Mama, dat bed is a lot of space for me but I sleep dare." She did well until about 2 a.m. when we heard a loud thump followed by some crying. She had pushed so hard up against the railing that they both fell to the floor. My husband got her settled and asked her if she wanted to move to her crib. She did not and went back to sleep in her big girl bed. About an hour later, we heard another thump followed by silence. She'd again pushed the railing and fallen but she slept through the whole thing. My husband discovered that we didn't have the railing in properly (bad, bad parents) so he fixed it and put her back to bed. The rest of the night and every subsequent rest period since have gone off without incident, although my husband is still jumping out of bed at every noise he hears!

The irony of the whole big girl bed is that when she wakes up in the morning or from her afternoon naps, she still yells for us to come get her. She doesn't climb out at all even though we moved her to the bed because she was climbing out of the crib. I'm thinking we are on borrowed time with that though.

The best part of all this is that she is really proud to have that bed and seems to appreciate it as a gift from mommy and daddy. She wants to show it to everyone who comes to our house and I love that we get to lie together and snuggle before sleep. She said to me this morning, "Mama. I think Turtle gonna like my big girl bed too."

Indeed... I think so too.