Getting a Ship into a Bottle

I'm sure at some point I blogged about the fact that the elder boy is the world's worst sleeper. In our efforts to try and mitigate this issue, we've tried everything under the sun. I'm going to go ahead and tack on the word "literally" here, even though, well, probably not literally. It just feels like it.

To recap in brief: We moved him from the crib to the toddler bed because he was climbing out of the crib and it seemed safer for that not to be happening. But he didn't like the toddler bed because it felt too open? No clue. He went with it for a while, but then he wanted his big boy bed (the double bed that was also in his room and was a life saver when he was an infant and would only sleep on someone.) So we moved him to the double bed. We tried with rails. We tried without rails. We tried just one rail. He hated it. Would not sleep in it, wanted to sleep in our room. We tried everything (bed on the floor, you name it, we tried it.) Finally, we took him shopping at Ikea and got him a bunk bed. And he loved it...for about three months. Then we were back to trying to figure out him not being in our bed all the time and we found a reasonable solution (semi-reasonable at least) of him starting in our bed and then we move him to his bed when we go to bed.

So last night, during the usual rigamarole of bedtime, he says "Can I sleep in your bed? I like it better cause it's bigger." And Tim, bless his heart, says "Do you want your big bed back? We can put the bunk bed in your brother's room and you can have the double bed back." And he says, "Yes!"

This evening we confirmed that that was, in fact, still the desired plan. And thus began a game that was a mixture of Tetris and ship-in-a-bottle logistics that had us both torn between laughing hysterically and swearing mightily.

First issue: the bed is actually larger than the doorway (width wise.) So you can't simply pull it, fully assembled, out into the hall, shift, and push into the other room. That would be too easy. No, you have to take the short ends (head/foot) off and the rail pieces that make a sturdy cube-like shape (Ok, not cube, rectangular prism. But you get the point.) Now you have this wobbly mess that's mostly like a twin bed with a ladder sticking up from one end of it, because of course the ladder is an integrated part of the bed. To make life easier, of course.

Second issue: That ladder sticks out just far enough that no matter how you twist, turn, or otherwise try and mash the bed, it won't fit through the doorway. Everything else will. But not the ladder.

Third issue: The only way to remove the ladder is to completely (and I do mean completely) disassemble the bed. Which no one was willing to do by the time we got to this point. Unless, of course, we decided not to ever reassemble it and just throw it out or store it somewhere as spare Ikea parts.

Finally, after putting our brains together, we did manage to find a way to get the monstrosity into the hall. At which point it got wedged. This is perhaps less the fault of the bed and more the fault of the way our hallway is designed. But that ladder certainly didn't make things easier. Un-wedging the bed got us back into...the wrong room. So we had to figure out how to get it back out of that and then back into the hallway. Tim gave it three more minutes. Thankfully his next solution got it into the baby's room. Or, at least, through the baby's doorway. Where it promptly got wedged again. There is now a big scrape in the baby's room where we, er, unwedged it.

If you imagine that over a two hour stretch of time, you'll get the idea. At this point, if the older boy decides he doesn't like the big bed and wants his bunkbed back, the boys will be sharing a room. Cause that bed's never moving again.