Crib Dilemma Update

We have had a couple of crazy days since my last post about her crib situation. On Sunday evening Bo went out with the missionaries, while he was gone I moved in her toddler bed. Boo helped me clean it up a bit since it has been sitting under our cover porch in the back yard since we moved in, in November. She seemed quite excited to have a new bed. She kept trying to climb on to it even before I had put the mattress on the bed.

She was even so excited that she put her dollies to bed, she read books, she fed her dollies in bed, really she just liked the fact that she could climb in and out so easily.

I was feeling good about her excitement of the new bed that I thought she might even be good about sleeping in it. Boy was I wrong! Bo didn't get home until after 9:00 and Boo's bedtime is at 8:00, so for an hour I was trying to get her to stay in her bed to settle down enough to fall asleep. Since the new year we now have the late church, we go at 1:00 and return at 4:00 so it makes it difficult, nay impossible to get a nap on Sunday. She was quite tired but was running around all over the place because she had gone past tired, past cranky, to the silly/hyper stage. Finally Bo got home and was no help at all because he had gone to a smokers house with the missionaries and he recked, so he got home and ran right to the shower. I finally got Boo in bed and settled; I sat on the floor next to her bed and sang for about 2 minutes and she was out! I knew she was tired, but she was in denial about it. I started to feel a sense of accomplishment, this wasn't going to be hard at all to transition to a toddler bed. Bo and I eventually went to bed and life was good... I haven't been sleeping well lately and so I get up frequently during the night. Since I'm up I usually go in and check on Boo to make sure she's still breathing (I have never stopped being a paranoid parent... Do they have anonymous classes for that?) and I also cover her back up. She never stays under her blanket, I think this is due to her being kind of a wild sleeper. This particular night, her first toddler bed night, she ended up on the floor. I don't really know how, I don't think she rolled off because she was on the other side of the guard rail. Being that it was 3:30am, I felt bad that she still had a couple more hours of sleep and she would be doing it on the floor. Here was my first mistake. I picked her up and put her in bed, thus causing her to wake up. And lets just say she didn't go back to sleep, at all. We tried putting her in her old crib, which it now takes her about 1 minute to get out of, sitting next to her bed and singing, just sitting there and keeping her in bed. Nothing worked. Our second mistake was that we should've just told her to go to bed and shut the door and left her, we have now learned better. So, long story short, she and we didn't sleep at all yesterday morning.

Last night was better and worse all at once. Going to bed was worse and we had to resort back to the old saying, "Babies should cry themselves to sleep". It was hard like it was the first time we did it and I caved a couple times. I tried to sing her to sleep again and ended up singing for about 30 minutes. So an hour and a half after we started trying to put her to bed Bo finally held me down so I couldn't go rescue her, while she cried herself to sleep. The better part was that she slept the whole night and didn't wake until after 8:00 this morning. That's a successful night in my book! We were going to keep her crib intact just in case we needed to resort back to it, but since she can so easily escape it's pointless. Plus once she escapes she can't get back in to have a place to sleep once she gets tired. I guess switching to a toddler/regular bed is just like anything thing else, its going to take some time and sleeplessness to get her acclimated to the idea.