Ready or Not

Tomorrow will be Tristan's 22nd day of sleeping in his big boy bed at night and for his afternoon nap.  Can I count his transition as complete?  I don't know.

Back in the winter I foolishly attempted to transition both boys to beds at the same time -- and more foolishly took both cribs apart to make room for the beds.  That was a complete fiasco.  The boys helped me assemble the beds and disassemble the cribs quite cheerfully.  "Boys like screwdrivers, Mom!"  But come nap time they wouldn't sleep, and not sleeping spiraled into exhausted fighting, and exhausted fighting turned into biting me.  We abandoned the nap, and staggered through until bed time, when we all finally gave into exhausted sobbing.  I called in reenforcements (Pa!), so Dane and I got the beds taken apart and the cribs back up two hours after bed time. Everyone slept, and I tried hard to pretend I'd never heard of such a thing as a big-boy bed.

The boys didn't forget, of course.  "Our big-boy beds are in boxes?  Get them out?  Set them up?  Sleep in them?  Please???!"

Eventually -- i.e. months later -- I reassembled one bed and set it up between the two cribs as a potty bribe.  Duncan tried to sleep in a few times, then the boys took turns trying to stay in it long enough to go to sleep.  Generally the boy in the bed would lie down for about 15 minutes before getting up and wreaking so much havoc that I moved him back to a crib to actually sleep.  Then suddenly, without much fanfare, Tristan started sleeping in the bed all night.  And then all afternoon.  There were a couple of days of me lying on the floor singing for an hour to make sure he was settled, but the number of songs got smaller, and I left the room earlier, and suddenly we were sailing. 

The funny thing was that through all of this Duncan never said a word about wanting to sleep in the big-boy bed.  When we first set up the bed between the cribs there was a lot of negotiating about who got to try to sleep in it.  But Duncan gradually stopped taking his turns.  When we asked him about it, he said, "Later.  I sleep in my crib.  I'm not ready yet."  

Meanwhile, he's been benefiting from a brother who suddenly has the freedom to deliver books and toys to his crib upon request.  Since I'm back to leaving the room before they're anywhere near asleep, they generally have a happy half-hour pow-wow over their books at nap time.  When they wake up and I go to take Duncan out of his crib, I'm amazed he can fit in there with all his stuff. 

All this is basically to say that things are going well.  Everyone is sleeping. 

So, you can imagine my alarm yesterday when I asked Duncan if he wanted me to set up his big-boy bed, and he said, "Yes!  I'm ready now!"

Wish us luck.