A good night's sleep

For the first time in over four years, we're down to only one crib in this house.

This went much better than we expected.

Our big kid bed rule is this: If they can stay in a bed with nothing but our words to keep them there, then they can have a real bed. If us telling them to stay in a bed won't do the trick, they stay in the crib.

We had serious doubts that our words would be enough to keep Jacob in his bed. But the bars on his crib weren't going to keep him in for much longer anyway, with the lure of a fun baby brother in the room, so we figured we'd give it a shot and hope for the best.

He took to it like champ.

He loved the "diggers and dumpers" sheets he had picked out himself, he loved having a pillow for his head and covers to pull over him. He loved his puppy pajamas and being able to tuck all of his stuffed puppies in with him. (Except for Tess. Tess puppy stays tucked under his arm, no matter what.)

The back-up crib we've used during our dual-crib days for the past four and half years didn't survive the disassembly, and was hauled off and repurposed by a friend for a laundry room drying rack project.

Levi finally inherited the "nice" crib, the one that has held one of our sleeping babies for the past 2,123 consecutive days. He barely noticed the change.

And Jacob was so enthralled with the new set up that he lay perfectly still in his bed, barely rustling the covers except to occasionally lift his head and peek to see if Levi was still awake. I realized after we tucked him in and said our Good Nights that "sleeping through the night" is not just a newborn goal. I hold my full night's sleep in high esteem, and was seriously hoping we hadn't messed with a good thing with this transition to a twin bed. But you can only lie still for so long before you get bored and nod off, which is precisely what happened in Jacob's case.

Twelve hours later, at 7:20 this morning, his bunny clock alerted him that it was wake up time. He had been awake and staring at it for some time, and promptly climbed out of bed, ran to his door, swung it wide and announced to the world, "My bunny's awake! I got out of my bed!"

If this trend continues, I'll need to take back all the things I said about how poorly Jacob's transition to a big boy bed was going to go. So far, all my predictions were dead wrong.

Turns out, he can handle this big boy bed thing just fine.