There Comes A Time In Every Young Man's Life

There comes a time in every young man's life when...he must leave his crib behind and sleep in a big boy bed! Now that our extended family has come and left again, we decided to start transitioning Braden to his twin bed. He has been very excited that there was a new piece of furniture in his room for weeks now, so we decided to dive right in this last week. Since we have absolutely no idea what we are doing as parents and Braden is sort of like a scientific experiment called "First Child", we are winging this whole big boy bed thing. In fact, one night last week we were getting him ready for bed and I had just put the crib rails on that day, so Tom asked me if we should just put him in the bed that night and try it out. I shrugged my shoulders as if to say, 'Sure, what the heck?" So we sung him his songs and said our goodnights and our "Buh-bye, see-yuh"s and left the room. A few minutes passed and Tom and I turned to each other and practically planned a parade to celebrate what ingenious parents we were because Braden was still in the bed! We really are idiots because literally right after I commented how surprised I was he was still in there, we heard the pitter-patter of little feet and a smiling Braden was next to us. We put him back to bed twice that night and then put him in the crib finally, figuring we would try it another night when we had more energy.

Well, a few days later Braden missed his normal afternoon nap and was extra tired, so I decided to try the bed thing again. So I sung him his songs and we said our goodnights and our "Buh-bye, see-yuh"s and then we had a serious mom-to-toddler discussion about how important it was to stay in his bed until Mom came to wake him up (yeah, right). I asked him before I left if he thought he could stay in his big boy bed and he said "Yah" (he says that almost every time you ask him a question though so I'm not really sure why I asked...). Well, it was a success! I think it had more to do with his fatigue and less to do with my little pep talk, but here he is the next morning:




And the morning after that:


As you can see, we are still working on sleeping vertically instead of horizontally, but it is going well. He usually stays in bed after we put him there so it hasn't been too painful. Yesterday morning he did come in our room at 6:30 am thinking it was time to get up (he usually sleeps in until at least 9). We put him back to bed and he went back to sleep. Easy enough.

This morning he did the same thing but at 4:15 am.

So maybe I need to have another pep talk with him. Yeah, that should help.