Get ready for maddness

This week at the library I got into a conversation with a fellow parent with a two year old.

"He just moved into his big boy bed this week," he announced, holding his son to include him in the conversation.

In a lowered voice he added, "It's been a bit tricky with all this new, exciting freedom."

From other parents I hear the same thing. "You have to lock toddlers in their room overnight or they'll terrorize the house... and you!" I've been assured.

Enter: The Montessori Floor Bed Experiment

Having been trained as a Montessorian for ages 2.5-6, I had heard about Montessori floor beds for children as young as 3 months.

My crude summary is that instead of putting your child in a crib when they move from their bassinet, you put them immediately in their "big kid bed" even before they can move. There's often rails for safety but a key is that there is some place they can crawl out of it when able.

As they can gradually move more, they experience incremental increases in freedom so by the time they are fully mobile it's not like releasing a fox in a hen house.

Whenever I share this with parents they usually look at me with something akin to pity for my naiveté and say softly:

"Good luck."

So this week, at just barely 5 months of age, we built Wyatt his floor bed and I'm going to document how this goes over the next few years into toddlerhood.

Place your bets now folks!

For context, Wyatt spent his first 4ish months in a Snoo, and then after lots of very disturbed sleep for all of us, we determined it wasn't just the 4 month sleep regression...he was OVER IT.

He's napped (supervised) in his Dock-a-Tot since birth and since we were leaving on a road trip anyway we decided he'd just sleep in his dock wherever we went.

Low and behold, he started sleeping through the night while we were traveling....sans Snoo.

***Important note: The American Academy of Pediatrics says letting a baby sleep unsupervised in a Dock-a- Tot is a BIG NO. But considering Wyatts size and 4 + months of observation we decided this was right for our family. I tell you to provide context for this experiment... not to encourage you to repeat this part yourself.

Also...at the start of this "experiment" Wyatt can currently roll over from back to belly on his left side and do a lot of swimming motions on his tummy.

The Floor Bed Diaries

Day 1: (Wyatt, 5 months, 4 days old)

Took about 4 hours to set up Wyatt's bed with my dad. (Wyatt was no help and often coerced "Pote" out of his building duties).

We got this one off Amazon because it said it could support the weight of an adult and we wanted to be able to get in bed and read with him (or accidentally take a nap with him). It seems to be of really sturdy, durable quality so far.

I was excited to have him sleep in there for his last nap of the day, but he seemed put off by the openness of the bed and preferred his Dock-a-Tot.

I've decided he'll let us know when he's over the dock, so for now, not much has changed with the introduction of the floor bed.