The Real Big Boy Bed

After several weeks of Alexander coming into our room and climbing into bed with us after having fallen out of his toddler bed, we realized he was getting too big for it. (And yes, this was only after about 3 months in that bed). I'm not actually sure if he was too big for it or if it was just because the kid moves around a lot in his sleep. When he's in bed with us, he usually punches and kicks us -- we think it's just his way of claiming real estate in the bed. But he occasional clocks either Francine or myself so hard that we wake up with a black eye in the morning.

In any case, last weekend we picked up a bed frame kit and ordered a double sized mattress and box-spring, all in preparation for the big boy bed.

And this past Saturday morning at 7:30 AM, the mattress was delivered. (Good thing too, after working a 16 hour shift the day before the last thing I wanted to be able to do was sleep in)

We spent most of the morning dismantling the old crib/toddler bed. The bed we'd bought was supposed to easily convert into a double bed with the purchase of a couple of bed rails from The Baby Depot, the place where we'd bought the original crib. Only, when we went there last weekend (this place is in Kitchener, about an hour's drive from Hamilton) to get the kit we found out that they no longer dealt with that distributor. (So we were not only SOL for the conversion to a child's bed, but also SOL for the cool change table conversion into a bookshelf/dresser. Dammit!

We made the best of it, of course. We bought a generic bed rail kit and thought we'd give it our best college try. On Saturday morning, once the mattresses arrived, I took out my handy toolbox and Alexander took out his tool. We selected some music for the occasion. (What better that The Baby Einstein Orchestra's "Baby Galileo" to inspire us to new heights of creativity)

We dismantled the original bed, but together the box-spring frame, and attached the old back of the crib pieces to create a headboard. That was relatively easy. It was getting the "foot-board" which used to be the old front dropping rail together that took the most time. And I won't even relate the long story about the first bed rail (being that thing you put onto an adult sized bed that prevents kids from rolling out of bed in the night) that I bought that broke within two minutes of putting it together, nor the desperate race to get to the mall in the early evening to buy another one.

But the bed finally came together and Alexander was delighted with it. After storytime that night, he immediately put in his sleepytime CD (yes, another Baby Einstein Orchestra CD) and climbed into bed. Fran and I kissed him goodnight and fawned over him for a good ten minutes. He was so tired from all that fawning that he drifted off to sleep the moment we stepped out of his room and closed the door.

I was reminded of the paranoid way we were when we first moved him out of the bassinet in our
room at the foot of our bed and into his own crib. Saturday night we were in his room no less than four times, checking on him, leaning over him and making sure he was breathing (okay, that was me -- I've never outgrown that fear which I've had since the day he was born. I'll likely still have it when he's thirty years old).

The funny thing is that he didn't move an inch all night. And when we went to wake him up in the morning, he was still in that cozy, snuggly spot he was in when we put him down. I have to admit that was the very first time he'd EVER been in exactly the same place when he went to sleep. Ironically, he slept like the proverbial baby in his adult sized bed.

Man, I gotta get me a mattress like that, so I can sleep like a baby, too.