Eating a pickle at RenFestElizabeth has now been in her big girl bed for almost 3 weeks. Yay! Elizabeth has been sharing the bed with us since she was a newborn, and we were starting to feel crunched in our queen sized bed. When we went to visit my parents a few weeks ago, we were facing a double bed that we knew from previous experience was too small to give any of us a good night's sleep. I decided it was time for an experiment.
My parents have a crib and mattress at their house for when they happen to have babies staying at their house. I took the mattress, put it on the floor beside my bed, and when Elizabeth fell asleep in our bed, I moved her to the mattress on the floor. To my surprise, she slept until almost 6 AM. And, to our delight, all of us slept much better. We hadn't realized how our movement during sleep would wake her, which would then wake us. She fussed a few times in her sleep early in the night, but I just reached over the edge of the bed and patted her back until she was quiet. By the end of our week there, she was sleeping all though the night with just an occasional fuss.
On our way home, we picked up a toddler bed, and set it up in our room right next to our bed. She got to pick out her sheets (she chose pink. go figure.), and she was and continues to be pretty enthusiastic about her big girl bed. Sometimes she still wakes up at night. Sometimes I wake up to find her snuggled right next to me in my bed. Still, though, I think we've made substantial progress.
This has been simultaneous with some other big changes in her life - we've been working at night weaning, and reducing day time nursing. She now only nurses once or twice in a day, compared to 3-4 times a day and 1-2 times at night just 3 months ago. And, she seems enthusiastic about her little potty, although we're not pushing her to do that. If she says something about the potty, she can sit on it, but we're not running her off to the potty every 20 minutes. Only one or two big changes at a time!
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