Toby is now 20 (and a half) months old and his sleep issues are already well documented on this blog! Actually, his sleep has been getting much better over the last few weeks and he even seems to have stopped the screaming when we left the room which had become a feature of bedtimes recently.
I have been starting to wonder though whether Toby’s sleep might be improved by a move out of his cot and into a bed. Although he’s very tall he still has lots of room in his cot and (so far) hasn’t attempted to climb out. He does bump against the sides quite a bit when he’s going to sleep and sometimes in the night and I wonder if this is disturbing his sleep.
He’s going to have to move into a bed sooner or later and with the new baby arriving in August I’m keen to move him before we need his cot so he doesn’t feel like he is being evicted! Eventually both children will have to share a room (until we move house) but I’m hoping that we will manage to keep the baby in with us for longer than we did with Toby. We put him in his own room when he was six weeks old because his reflux made him very noisy in his sleep and we all slept better when he wasn’t in with us.
My main concern with moving Toby into a bed is that he will then have the freedom to get out and potentially cause chaos. He loves going in the drawers and wardrobe in his room and unless we put locks on everything I can see us waking up to find everything all over the floor! I think we would also need to put a gate across his door as he can easily open all the doors in our house. We currently have a gate across the hall which means Toby can still get to our room. This is fine if we’re there but if we were downstairs I think he might be out of bed and running around all over the place.
Of course, I might be wrong and he might just love a big boy bed and stay in it all night. I know the only way to find out is to make the leap but I am more than a little apprehensive. I think we are going to get a bed in the next few weeks (and I’m planning on going straight to a single rather than a toddler bed) and then we might put it in Toby’s room and see what he makes of it. We’ve booked a caravan holiday in May too and Toby is going to have to sleep in a bed, with a bed rail, then as he’s too big for the travel cot now and I think maybe getting him used to a bed at home first might be a good idea.
I’d love to hear when you moved your little ones into their big beds. Are there any issues I haven’t thought of or was it all plain sailing and I should just stop worrying and do it?
LP was 21-22 months ish when we moved her and she did incredibly well straight into a single bed – didn’t get out of it at all until we came in at get up time and only really started getting up by herself about a year later. Having a baby gate on her door was the best thing though so that she couldn’t roam x
Bagl was a few days before he was 2, it also turned into a double whammy of moving him into his own room too (we did a lot of a co-sleeping so easier to have his cot in with us, and during his first winter his room was really cold). We were going to do it gradually, start with naps then move to nights but after his first nap in there he wanted to spend the night in there too – I slept so badly that night missing him!! He was almost grown out of his cot though, if we’d had a cot bed I’d have moved that through first and then progressed to a bed. We still sit with him whilst he goes to sleep so there haven’t been any messing around issues. There was a patch where bedtime was taking ages and we wanted to just let him get on with it (obviously going back to him if he was upset) so we got a stair gate but then it arrived and for us it didn’t feel right to put it on, maybe if we had done it from the beginning I might have felt differently but he had got used to being able to come through to us in the night and I didn’t want him to feel that he couldn’t do that anymore. I suppose it comes down to what works for you and your family best. We’re back to part time co-sleeping but I’m fine with that, it gets us the most sleep and he doesn’t thrash about as much as he used to! I would probably feel a bit differently if we had another baby on the way though so can see why you want to get things sorted.