Finally I finished

The week after Thanksgiving and the week before Dax turned 2 he started climbing out of his crib. Our stress-free, easy nights of putting Dax to bed and not having to worry about him for the next 12 hours quickly became a nightmare! Naps became a total disaster, bedtime was worse, and now he was waking up in the middle of the night...something he hadn’t done since he was three months old. We made an emergency decision to ditch the crib and get him a twin bed. I had decided a long time ago I was going to skip the toddler bed phase so we would only have one transition to worry about rather than two. It was cold turkey, one day his crib was in his room; the next day it was his "big boy" bed.

It was eventually going to happen anyway. Once Wyatt would grow out of his cradle and would need to sleep in the crib, that's when we figured we would make the transition with Dax. We figured we would leave things as they were until Wyatt came along and see how Dax adjusted to that, and then once he was comfortable with Wyatt in the house we would try and transition him into a new bed. Well, Dax must have sensed a big change was coming. It was probably the size of my growing belly that I would catch him staring at in confusing that tipped him off. Now all of a sudden, with six weeks until Wyatt would be arriving I knew I had my work cut out for me so that I wouldn't have a toddler running around in the middle of the night with me and the baby!

Dax definitely made us work to get him used to his bed. There were many a nights that he slept on the floor, in the living room, in the hallway, anywhere but his bed! He was throwing the biggest, baddest tantrums in the middle of the night that we were constantly battling. You would think at nap time he'd be so exhausted from being up half the night that he would just lay right down. No such luck!

Now looking back, the funniest part was the stories he started coming up with as to why he wasn't staying in bed. He would come to the door and say "I stinky again"---not true. Or he would say "Owie" and hold his head like he bumped it---not true. Anything to get us back into the room with him. Needless to say we started telling him the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf! Who knows if he understood the moral, but we tried! J

His room was a total makeshift room when the crib moved and the bed came in. I couldn't hardly stand to look in it because everything was jumbled around and looked so out of place. The bedding was random (like I said, emergency decision with no planning), there was nothing fun and “boy” about it and he had toys everywhere which made for even a harder battle when he would get out of bed because he would wind up playing. I had bought a headboard from a neighbor for $10 and planned on re-doing it, but that wasn't going to happen until the baby was born when it was okay to use paint.

Just as Wyatt arrived we started to make progress with Dax. Naps finally became routine again and bedtime was a lot easier because he actually had some shuteye under his belt. I think about it now and he was probably just trying to help his mom out and get her used to being up in the middle of the night! Either way, now I was excited to work on his room. I just wanted to make it as "boy" as I could....Camo sheets, bold navy blue and moving out all of his "baby" toys. I re-finished the headboard, did a little artwork for the wall with some pictures that my friend Jen took that are some of my favorite of Dax, and replaced all the baby toys with a fun train table he had gotten for Christmas that we didn’t move in until he was sleeping better. I couldn't be happier and Dax is sleeping like a baby. I think he likes his new room and finally gets the concept of big boy now that Wyatt is around. Now if the rest of us could just get back to 12 hours of sleep…