Cribs, Toddlers, and Dangerous Acrobatics

The last six weeks have been a struggle for us with Abby going to bed at night. She just doesn't keep her body in bed long enough to fall asleep (please read: she gets out of bed about every 3 minutes). We've tried a number of solutions and our last ditch effort was putting her in the portacrib after she got up the second time. Turns out she liked the portacrib so it wasn't much of a punishment, but at least we weren't yelling at her and she was falling asleep. Being lazy parents, we just figured we'd try the portacrib for a while until we could come up with another solution. I'm sure if her bedroom door actually closed we would have used a child lock about 2 days into this set of bedtime frustrations. Well, last week we decided to sit by her door so she could see us and hopefully stay in bed. (Thank you, Samira) It might have worked if she weren't so excited to have an "audience" to entertain.


Fast forward to three nights ago when Sam also decided that bedtime was not sleeping time and Roy and I decided we were going to nip this little problem in the bud. I took Sam out to our porch swing and attempted to get him to sleep. By the way, that didn't work and the little stinker ended up falling asleep on his own with no crying when I laid him completely awake in bed. Roy took Abby duty. Abby continued to do everything possible to stay awake. Roy finally put her in the portacrib and decided to call it a night.

5 seconds later Abby was at the door again. She has learned to climb out of her portacrib which is quite an accomplishment since the bar goes up to her neck. Roy thought it might have been a fluke so he put her in the portacrib again and sure enough she was at the door again 5 seconds later. So being the great disciplinarians that we are, we laughed until we cried.

Finally, I came up with the genius idea of turning on primary music on her stereo to help her go to sleep. She thought it was the best idea ever and immediately went to bed. She stayed up at least an hour in bed listening to her primary music but she stayed in bed. Ever since that night she has stayed in bed because now we can threaten to turn off the primary music. The one true threat that actually works!