Sleeping Like a Baby

Daylight savings time used to be a thing of beauty - at last in the fall. I used to revel in that extra hour of languid unconsciousness. But somehow or other, the kiddo has yet to grasp the joy of an extra hour of sleep, and thus it was business as usual, regardless of what the clocks said Sunday morning. Of course, with my kiddo who seems to feel that sleep is really one of those optional activities, the business as usual came on the heels of a night of waking up every couple of hours.

Saturday, after our soccer game, I asked Tim if he wanted to go to Ikea. Now, before you question our sanity regarding Ikea on a Saturday, with his schedule lately, if we're going to go, it's unfortunately going to be on the weekend. With the new baby on the way, the upstairs is getting a fairly major overhaul. The upstairs of our house looks something like this:

This is nowhere near to scale - (and you'll probably have to click to embiggen) - because BR2 is actually the largest bedroom, while BR1 and BR3 are roughly equivalent. Also we do not have a huge hole in the wall of the Master bedroom, nor is it long and super skinny. You get the idea.

Anyway, currently, the kiddo resides in BR3. The original decision to make this the kiddo's room was based solely on the fact that BR1 houses our library and BR2 was set up as the guest room and BR3 was empty save for a few boxes that were easily and quickly moved into one of the other room's closets. At the time, we thought about moving stuff around, but we were working on a 6 week clock and didn't think that was the best use of time. Plus we are lazy.

But now, with a new kiddo on the way, we're thinking that it'd be good for them to each have their own room since we clearly have the space for that to happen. And so we are going to move the kiddo to BR1, combine the library and guest room into BR2, and put the new baby in BR3 as it's already fairly "nursery-ish" (though I did make it big boy-ish as well, if not for the new baby, the kiddo wouldn't be moving.)

In addition, we have been going back and forth about what to do crib-wise. See, I got the kiddo one of those cool 3-in-1 crib thingys, so it went from crib to toddler bed to head/foot board for a double bed. And we had moved him to the double bed in the late spring. Except that it did not, as we had hoped, solve his sleeping issue. If anything, it might have made it slightly worse. And so for the last three months, or thereabout, he has been sleeping on an air mattress in our room. And that works, except for that whole we'd really like to sleep in our room without a child present thing.

So, in discussing with the kiddo about the new baby, he said he'd like to move rooms and give his room to his brother. And Tim mentioned the idea of bunk beds, which got an incredibly positive reaction from the kiddo, and thus we found ourselves at Ikea on a Saturday. (Why is it that I'm hearing the Monty Python-esque yelling of "get on with it!" in my head?)

Long story short, while I had been on a fact finding mission, Tim and the kiddo fell in love with the Kura. And while I was content to wait a bit, Tim was gung ho, the kiddo was asking if it would be set up soon enough for him to nap in it (a very positive sign), and we loaded one up (along with several impulse items, which we seem to be unable to resist - including the Klappar Haj. Because honestly, what boy doesn't need a shark that's bigger than him?)

Saturday night, we set the kiddo up in his new bed...and it was a disaster. He was up, I don't know, nine times before we even made it to bed? And then another 4 times after we did get to bed (at around midnight). I was having trouble sleeping anyway, and after the last one at 4:30 I just gave up and went downstairs and felt sorry for myself because I'd really hoped that the new bed was finally going to fix things. And also I had indulged the delusion about the extra hour of sleep even if I knew better.

Last night did better, I'm happy to say. He slept from the time we put him down til just before 5, and Tim was getting up anyway at that point so could easily get him resettled. I'd like to say I went back to sleep, but not so much. Still, it's an improvement...fingers crossed that the trend continues. Of course, I'm sure the new baby will throw everything off again, but we could get 3 months of good sleep in the mean time, and that sounds pretty perfect to me.