Toddler Beds

Who would have ever thought these cute little beds could cause so much chaos in our lives. As most of you know Liam has been a climber and started getting out of his crib at just 7 months old. Thankfully, we discovered the crib tent and night time had been pretty uneventful ever since.

The boys would go down at around 7pm every night and would be out like little lights by 7:15pm.

Well all that came to a crashing halt when we were informed that the crib tents were being recalled. Much to our dismay we had no choice but to make the move to toddler beds. Now the boys are 2 and half so it is probably time anyway but it was a battle we weren't looking forward to fighting and it turns out we were right.

Our bedtime routine went from 15 minutes when they were in the cribs to 2 hours a night in the toddler beds :(

What we tried:

Reading to them in their beds until they get tired and go to sleep -this can take an hour and half and even while reading they try and get up 500 times.

Bribery - A friend of ours had great success with bribery and we were all for it, "if you stay in bed all night you get chocolate", "if you stay in bed you get a toy" I would've promised them ANYTHING but their short little attentions spans just don't allow for bribery to work unfortunately.

Leaving them alone in their room until they decided to settle down -We bolted everything to the walls for safety and took out anything that may be harmful. That was a major failure as when I finally went in because they were laughing so hard I found them completely naked and it looked like a baby wipe explosion in the room. They found the costco sized box of baby wipes and had emptied 8 packages of them all over the room. Now the room did smell baby fresh which was nice and they had wiped down and cleaned all the furniture and each other but I still wasn't amused.

 

A few weeks later we decided to try leaving them alone again and I will not gross you out with the full details but I will just say that one of them had a dirty diaper, the other one decided he would try and change him. He tried wiping him, he dropped the dirty diaper, I am not sure exactly what happened after that but somehow #2 was everywhere in the room. I wanted to MOVE!

 

Staying in the room with them - The last few nights Jeff has basically laid on their floor in between them until all three of them fall asleep and though this option isn't bad for me, it isn't sustainable forever. We worked hard to get them to be great self soothing babies who could fall asleep on their own so I don't want to make them dependent on us being there for them to fall asleep now that they are toddlers.

 

They definitely feed off of each other but we do not have enough rooms in our house to separate them long term and so we aren't sure we want to try that in the short term because we will have to transition back when the baby comes and may face the same problems again.

 

I HATE TODDLER BEDS!

 

We will keep you posted on how it goes, hopefully things will get better SOON!

UPDATE:
OK so it took months but bedtime finally has settled down again. In the end the thing that worked best for me was simple and discovered by complete accident. Liam asked me to keep the door open one night. I told him I would leave it open "if" he stayed in bed, miraculously he did and things got better from there.

Jeff is still a softy and will lay down with them sometimes but I think now he just likes the 7:30pm nap ;)