Switching to a Big Kid Bed Early

We switched Cai to a "big boy bed", aka a twin mattress on the floor, when he was thirteen months old. Switching that early wasn't something we had planned on, but it worked for us.

We switched for a couple reasons, but the main one was that Cai was still waking to nurse four to six times a night. I was so sleepy and was majorly struggling with keeping my eyes open while sitting with him in the rocking chair. And Cai was struggling, at times, with staying asleep, but would sleep better if I had my hand on his back (or sometimes even crawled in the crib and laid next to him).

So we made the switch. We did kind of a "test nap" where I put the crib mattress on the floor and had him nap on that. When he did okay, I took the crib down and put a twin mattress on the floor. There was very little, if any, difficulty with the transition. Cai took to it right away.

We did have to do a few things to make it work (other than move the glider rocker to our living room).

• We put all of his stuffed animals on the side of the bed against the wall because he was rolling and hitting his head against the wall.
• We keep one of his larger stuffed animals on the other side of him to keep him from rolling out of the bed. He only rolled once before we did that, and it's really only a two inch drop, so it's not the end of the world, but the stuffed animal seems to help.
• Double check that his room is a safe place. I switched the contents of some of the drawers in his dresser so he couldn't access them, put his piggy bank up higher, and recently switched from a wet bag for dirty cloth diapers to a diaper pail (we kept the bag on the door knob and he was pulling on it)
• We started keeping the door closed so he wouldn't roam the house in the middle of the night, and closing the other door in the hallway just in case he did escape. That being said, last night was the first night he did anything other than get up and cry at the door until one of us comes for him.

Overall, we're pretty happy with the change. Even though Cai isn't nursing anymore, he's also climbing over everything now (the back of the couch, onto the dining room table), so we're glad we didn't have to deal with that in the crib. He's also waking much less most nights, but when he does have a restless night, it's nice that Steve or I can lay with him and even fall asleep. It's also nice that his room is now super safe, so I can be comfortable letting him play in there while I cook dinner (his room is right off of the bedroom.