Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The Sleeping Saga Continues

We are still working on getting LP to sleep in her big girl bed. We moved the baby gate from the top of the stairs to the door of her bedroom, thinking that if she was more contained perhaps she would be more likely to stay in the bed.

To those of you reading this it will be obvious that this is not really logical. She stays in her room, but not necessarily in the bed. Two of the last four night we have discovered her sleeping on the floor near the door - once with a blanket balled up as a pillow and another time with her little head resting on the door jam. The Hoos transports her to the "bed" (as a reminder, this is a twin mattress on the floor next to her crib) and all is well.

Until 12:30 or 4:30 or both. When LP stands up, walks to the gate and starts chanting "Daaaaaadddddyyyyyyyyy." We have no idea why she does this. She never did this when she was in her crib and really the scenario hasn't changed much.And no amount of "LP, go back to bed!" cajoling actually gets her to return to her bed. Sigh....

What this means is that the Hoos has to get up, go to her room and rest with her. Typically as soon as she sees him she runs back into the bed, but she doesn't really return to sleep. And so he waits. After a while he figures she is relaxed enough and he quietly gets up and returns to our bed.

Monday, in order to keep her calm and because it was the second time he had to respond to her calls, he left the gate open when he crept out at 4:30, even though she was awake. That meant that at 6:15 I had a little visitor standing next to me. A little visitor who did not want to go back to sleep even though she was up half the night. I carried her into her room, shut the gate and the door and made use of the "bed". She played around me, diapering Baby, changing her clothes, putting on "undies" (pull-ups) and generally creating a mess while I tried to delude myself into thinking this counted as extra sleep.

Last night she only woke up once at 4:30 and when I left the house at 7 she was sleeping nicely on the bed. The Hoos reported that at 7:45 when he went to wake her up he found her quietly and deliberately emptying her dresser onto the floor - I guess trying to pick out her outfit for the day.

The only twin bedframe we have for her right now is all metal and moving it into her room would require removing the crib and some significant rearrangement and we just can't figure out if the time is right yet.

Any ideas on how to keep her in the bed? Do you think that having a bed frame with the rail attached will really help (it is not like she still won't be able to climb down, although it might make it more difficult to get back on once she is off)?

3 comments:

DaisyJo_Mom said...

Have you considered a Toddler Bed? We did that for RJ and it worked really well. You take the crib mattress out and use it on the toddler bed. He was in that for a few months before going into a regular bed.

Anonymous said...

Darlin' I got nothing here. We still get frequent visitors in the middle of the night. It's a beautiful thing.

The only thing I've found helpful was walking them back to their room, putting them back in bed and spending a few minutes with them there. There's been no way for me to do that over the last six months, so no go.

I'm hoping that once the new baby shows and becomes a nightime disturbance for them, they'll decide to stay in their own room.

Anonymous said...

put her back in the crib! it only gets worse once the new baby comes & she realizes you're awake with the baby! Trust me! And S was a whole year older when J was born.
-JM's Mom