Toddler Bed

About a month and a half ago we bought a toddler bed for Ava. You may remember, we'd tried converting Ava's crib into a toddler bed before and it didn't go so well (see Morning Already? from April 2008). Well, now that Doni's pregnant we realized that we're going to need that crib for the baby this spring. We were going to have to figure out how to get her in a toddler bed.

We found one online that we liked and bought it through Wal-Mart's Site-to-Store shipping. A few days later we picked it up and I assembled it that weekend. We put it in Ava's room along with her crib thinking that, unlike last time, I wouldn't have to go to the trouble of converting her crib when she refused to go to sleep in the toddler bed. Maybe we could ease her into it. Maybe an afternoon nap in the toddler bed followed by sleeping at night in her crib. After a few days of this, maybe she would just decide she liked the toddler bed better. It didn't go exactly as planned.

I took her upstairs to her bedroom for her afternoon nap one day and laid her in her toddler bed. She realized what was happening and started to swing herself out of bed while expressing her displeasure. I told her, "Lay down. I'll see you after your nap," and I shut her bedroom door behind me. I stood at the door listening to see what would happen. As expected, she came to the door crying and trying to turn the doorknob. After a little while I decided it wasn't worth it went back in her bedroom. She ran over to the side of her crib, stood on her tip-toes, and lifted her arms so that I would pick her up and put her in the crib for her nap. How were we going to make this work?

For a couple of weeks her toddler bed sat in her room unused. I would talk up her "Big Girl Bed" and how she neat it was that she could sleep in it instead of her crib (BLAH!). She wasn't picking up what I was throwing down though. At the mention of her bed she would get whiney and say "crib" in the way that daughters do when they want to convince their daddy of something. Eventually I came up with another idea.

I knew that it wasn't that she couldn't sleep anywhere other than her crib. When we go somewhere away from home she sleeps in her playpen without much of a fuss. Granted, she can't get out of her playpen, but she can get out of her toddler bed. The other thing that's different is that we usually are sleeping in the same room with her when she's not spending the night in her crib.

So, one night we took the air mattress from our guest bedroom and laid it next to Ava's toddler bed. At bedtime we laid Ava down in her bed, but she was putting up a fight. When she realized that we were going to be sleeping on the mattress right next to her, though, she settled right down. Before long she was asleep! Success!

It wasn't an uneventful night. She was used to rolling all around in her crib and never being able to fall out. Her toddler bed has a rail, but it only covers half of the side of the bed. Doni says that Ava kept hanging parts of her body off of her bed and onto ours throughout the night. She did wake me up once because the only thing still on Ava's bed was Ava's head. I put her back, tucked her in, and promptly snored my way back to dreamland. Eventually the sun rose, morning came, and we all woke up. We congratulated Ava on being such a big girl and sleeping in her bed.

That was the turning point. Ever since, Ava has slept in her toddler bed without a fuss. If we could only figure out a trick to get her potty trained...