Photograph by Daddy, May 21, 2006.  She looks so like my mom in this picture!

 

So tonight we moved her to a bed.

 

 

I have to say, I won’t miss that crib.  It was used, and I never lowered the rail because it made such a God-awful noise.  Lowering a 25+ pound toddler onto a mattress while standing on my toes so I could bend over the rail was not a fun experience for my back.  Plus the springs under the mattress were really, really noisy.  Of course, that was nice, since I could hear her rolling over at night...but I can also hear the handle of a binky at forty paces, so I think I’ll be okay.

 

I kind of wanted to delay it.  She’s been sick, and I told myself it might be better to wait until she was well again.  And she’d just started sleeping so well, it made sense to wait for that pattern to be established.  And, and, and...I project on her.  I am not good at change myself, so I assume Emily won’t be.  I thought of all the ways we could have staged this slowly - but when push comes to shove, maybe the yanking-the-bandaid method really is the best.  It’s not like she hasn’t slept in that bed before - she has.  Last night, with me, as a matter of fact.  So the only changes will be sleeping there by herself, and not having the view from her crib anymore.

 

She had a nice long bath, and some medicine, and we went into her room to do our usual ritual.  She was a bit manic, which could have been the illness or a reaction to change - hard to tell.  When I told her we had to give up the books, she got very upset - cried for almost ten minutes.  Was it the strangeness of the room?  Or was it just the ordinary distress of being told “no”?  Either way, I cried a bit with her, feeling terribly guilty for disrupting her safe place.  (No choice, though.  Now or later.  And she was getting much, MUCH too tall for the crib.)

 

But she settled, and got dozy, and I lay down on the bed with her.

 

The first thing she did was sit straight up and look around.  I’d moved all of her stuffed animals and her green pillow, so there were familiar things around.  She looked for just a moment, then lay back down against me.  It took her a while to close her eyes, and even then she was twitchy for a while.  She finally became relatively still, and I started to wonder how the heck I was going to get up without disturbing her.  I figured it’d probably be a case of trial and error; so I slid away from her and sat up awkwardly.  (The mattress is awful - there really is no good way to do it with any finesse.)  And damned if she didn’t just snooze through the whole thing.

 

I stood up, lifted the safety rail, put on her extra blankets, and left the room.  Total time: about an hour.

 

So...we’ll see.  My big girl in a real bed.  At the very least it’ll be more comfortable for Mommy to deal with in the middle of the night - or maybe she won’t need me like that anymore.

 

She looks so very small in that bed.