Big Boy Bed

Rohan's in a big boy bed, with training wheels. On Saturday morning I covered my head with a pillow and graciously growled at my husband to take the kids, "To McDonald's or wherever...I don't care...I want to sleep in!" I like how I not only avoided wife slash parenthood, I also encouraged the overpriced consumption of what amounts to greasy plastic.

Either way, it didn't work because 15 minutes later I heard laughter and pounding and general insanity happening what must be a mere 30 feet from my bed in Rohan's room. Annoyed, I moved the pillow just enough so as to be able to hear what was happening. Turns out, my husband cannot be left unsupervised for greater than 12 minuntes without feeling the need to demolish something in our house. This time, it was the crib.

A review of our internet browsing history would show you that while most decent red-blooded married men in America are looking at porn online, mine is Googling how to pound out tile with a sledghammer or ideas for turning a crib into a toddler bed. I'm sure the nudie pictures are more a 10 pm than a 6:40 am habit anyway.

So I gather from my super-slueth skills that he is removing the front of the crib to make it a psuedo-toddler bed. Downstairs in our den turned weight room turned playroom lives a mattress just the right width to slide into the crib's frame, so I doze again and in my dream I am annoyed because I go into Rohan's room and find the bed has taken over and I cannot open the closet or dresser. Of course, this angers me, and so rather than waking appreciative that my husband has done this work, I'm ready to trip to my death over an extra-large mattress my mother in law insisted on leaving in our front room just in case we had immediate plans to convert crib to toddler bed or serve as a homeless overflow shelter. So imagine my surprise and inability to be irrationally bitchy when I realized he had merely removed the front wall of the crib, so it was like "a toddler bed with training wheels".

Which is fine, except these things: (1) Rohan LOVES his crib. Why mess with success???, (2) Rohan moves a lot in his sleep, (3) Said psuedo-bed is rather narrow for a wiggly monster-sized baby when it has no guardrails, thus meaning he falls off it. Multiple times in one sleep.

Exhibit A: 1st Naptime. I try to put Rohan down and he's livid. LIVID. How DARE we fuck with him like this? He's mad as hell and the neighborhood knows. Meanwhile I have to leave 5 minutes ago for a work thing, so I hand the kid over feeling like I just wrestled an alligator and lost. Husband ends up breaking his own rules and letting Rohan sleep in our bed.

Exhibit B: 1st Bedtime. I am in a pleasant mood (ha. Haha.) and attempt to put Rohan to bed. He won't allow me to just lay him down and leave like I've done for months in a row now. OH NO. He demands rocking, 2.5 songs, and a hand on his back, patting (not rubbing, woman!) in order to fall asleep. Sleep is met by an almost instantaneous drop the distance from the mattress to the floor. Not enough to damage his delicate body, but enough to make him simper sleepily. I lift him back into psuedo-bed and he's back asleep. He falls once more and the move back into psuedo-bed is repeated. I go to bed and sleep through the night, but in the morning he's sound asleep 3 feet away from his psudo-bed, tangled into a blanket.

Exhibit C: 2nd Naptime. He fell asleep in the car, so no issues, although he does fall out of the bed at some point, but it wakes neither him nor anyone else since we're all napping.

Exhibit D: 2nd Bedtime. Rock. Sing. Try to set down. Told "NO!". Rock. Sing, Half-lay on bed while setting him down, then slowly unravel myself from him. First I get the arm out from under him. Then I lean my upper body away so it's not resting on him. Last, a quick move of my body off the mattress, followed by the removal of the hand that's on his back. A quiet murmur of "no" from him is all I get before he softly snores. He ends up falling out of bed crying no less than 3 times and possibly as many as 5 before I move him to Luca's twin size bed where he stays snug as a bug.

Exhibit E: 3rd Bedtime. Tell husband about the issues last night, and order him to make something work or I will be forced to use non-tender methods to wake HIM when Rohan inevitably falls out of bed 6 times tonight and let HIM deal with it while I fart and snore in my sleep. He heads upstairs and decides the solution involved moving a large toy in front of the mattress to serve as a white-trash bedrail. I bite my tongue, which takes a lot of self control for a mouthy know-it-all such as myself. 15 minutes later he's crying and I head up to find his upper body on the bed and the lower body between the bed and the toy. Unamused by such a blatant inconvenience to my sleep (oh, and the whole 'choking and suffocation hazard' thing) I adjust him and move the toy.

This proves something. I am right. Rohan may be built like a kindergartener, but he's still a wee baby. He's not ready for the psuedo-bed. And neither am I.