Monday, May 9, 2011

18 months and no more crib?

Little Claire is growing up fast.  18 months already, can you believe it? I can't.  Maybe it's because she's the second child, or maybe because we had so much going on with moving (a few times) and pregnancy but time has seems to be going by so fast!
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She is one spunky little girl. She has so much personality and boy, does she love her big brother.  She follows Boden everywhere and wants to do everything he does.  He, for the most part, is great about it and wants to show her how to do new things and of course tell her what to do.  I seriously love watching them interact.  I'm excited to see how they take to having a new baby around.

Speaking of new baby, it was time to move Claire out of the crib to make way for #3.  I was so nervous about this since she's just 18 months, and honestly moving Boden out of the crib was a serious chore for a really long time.  He has just now gotten to where he stays in bed when we put him to bed.

Boden and Claire are continuing to share a room at our new house, and we thought it would be fun to get them a bunk bed.  It's not a traditional bunk bed, because they are really too little for that, but it's much lower to the ground.  It's from IKEA -
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The top bunk is only about as high as my waist and it has sides all the way around so he can't roll out.  And the bottom bunk is right on the floor, so it's easy for Claire to get in and out and not a big deal if she falls out.  It has a fun little tent for the top bunk that we had on at first.  Boden really liked it during the day, but kept asking us to take it off at night.
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I think it made things just a little too dark for him.  We decided to just take it off and maybe in a few months or a year he might be ready for it.  I made their coordinating quilts over the past couple months and was so excited to finally finish just last week.

My sister, Molly, helped me out by planning out the quilts for me.  I just told her how many different prints I wanted to use, how big I wanted the finished quilts to be, and that I wanted to keep it simple since I knew I didn't have a lot of time to get them done.  She came back with all kinds of tables and measurements and told me exactly how much fabric of each print to buy.  It was fun to have her design it for me.  My brain totally used to work that way, and I used to enjoy figuring out stuff like that... but since having little kids and being pregnant I just can't seem to sit down and focus on those kind of details for more than 2 minutes at a time! lol.  Anyway,  here's the quilts:  (Mostly made with fabrics from Amy Butler's Soul Blossom collection, with a few other random prints thrown in)  I'm so happy with how they turned out and I really had fun making them.

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So, back to Claire in her big girl bed.  Since 6 mo old Claire has been an amazing sleeper - just lay her down and she's out for 12 hours.  Bedtime was always a breeze, so I was a little scared we might have to give that up with the new bed.  The first night was a dream though....I put her down and didn't hear from her til morning... and that continued for the first 4 nights.  Aside from the one night where we found Bo and Claire wandering the hallway at 2 am, Boden insisting that Claire needed to go potty so he was taking her..(no, she is not even close to being potty trained...i'm sure she had no idea what was going on!)  I thought for sure we had gotten a pass on this one!

Night 5 however, was a different story.  I think she finally figured out that she could get out of her bed.  And she did....over and over and over until we finally got exhausted and put her in the pack n play at 10pm so we could all go to bed.  The next night I was determined to outlast her.  I put her to bed and sat on her floor with my back to her.  I put her back in bed, no talking or anything, every 5-10 SECONDS for about an hour! The child is determined I tell you!  Then for the next 30 min she went from getting up every 45-60 seconds to kicking the wall and giggling about it.  Finally after about and hour and 45 min she started settling down and by 2 hours she was asleep.  I decided to go downstairs and have a bowl of ice cream to celebrate my victory.  I should have gone to bed to get my rest....had I known we would have a repeat of this event from 4-6am!

It's a week later now and I'm sitting outside her room and she's only gotten up 4 times in an hour, although tonight I have peeked in 3 other times to find a pantless, diaperless, giggling little girl that I have had to re-dress...that's new.... I thought we were making improvements?!  It's taking about 1 1/2 hrs to get her to bed each night and we still have issues once in awhile in the middle of the night when she gets up and wanders around and we have to start all over getting her to bed.  Not as much improvement as I had hoped in a week.   We had one interesting hiccup the other day at naptime...she got up and closed her door and locked it....but couldn't unlock it.  They are the kind of doors that have a little flat key that unlocks them from the outside....but none of those little keys were left here when we moved in.  We eventually had to completely removed the doorknob to get her out!  poor thing was scared.  It reminded me of the time when we lived in an apartment and Boden was about Claire's age.  I went out on the back deck for some reason and he went in, shut the sliding door and locked it.....him inside and me out on the deck - 3 floors off the ground!  It was so scary - I had no idea what I was going to do and poor Boden just started crying.  Thankfully, Michael came home early from where ever it was that he was and I only ended up being locked out there about 10 minutes.

Ahhh, the joys of parenthood.  In just a few short days or weeks I'll be up all night with another one.  Thank God he gives us the grace to do it.  (And amazing husbands who help! I have to give some credit here to Michael - he has been getting up for all the middle of the night sessions lately and letting me sleep...THANK YOU!) I'm praying our new little guy just starts sleeping thru the night at 6 weeks on his own....I've heard these children actually exist...let's pray I get to experience that first hand one day!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Your making me scared. Olivia is getting close to the big girl bed too, but I just can't think about all of the struggles again. When did you decide with Boeden? Good luck your doing way better than I will be!!!

Megan Brueseke said...

I know, it's really not the most fun part of parenting. Don't be scared though - I have friends whose children have had a really easy transition...just not MY kids :)

We moved Boden when he was just over 2, it was about 3 months before Claire was born. I'm not sure it would have matter when we moved him though - he still doesn't like sleep or being in bed - I think he's worried he's going to miss out on something!

heidi said...

I loved reading ALL of this! Miss you guys like crazy.