My son just turned one. For the last month or so, my wife and I have been more consistent with allowing my son to self-sooth himself to sleep, rather than “patting him out”. Most of the time he’s pretty good about it. He might cry for a minute when we leave the room, but quickly stops and lays back down. Every now and then, he has a melt down and really starts screaming (Thank god, we’re no longer in an apartment!) Still, after five or six minutes of screaming he often winds down, and puts himself to sleep.
Tonight though, I came home and the wife said he had already been going for several minutes. I gave him a couple of more minutes then went in and patted him until he was calm and drowsy, but not quite asleep. Then I left the room. He started crying again (to put it mildly!). We let him cry for a few minutes while discussing the possibility that he might be teething again. We decided to give him some Tylenol, and went to get him.
When my wife opened the door, she BUMPED the baby! He was ON THE FLOOR! The rails on his crib are fairly high. About shoulder level (on him). I wouldn’t have thought he could climb them. But apparently he did. Luckily the room is carpeted. He doesn’t show any tenderness when moving/touching his extremities. His pupils look okay and he doesn’t show any sign of injury. He calmed down as soon as we picked him up. But it was still a scary distance to fall for a baby. I think its time for a toddler bed…
He shares a room with his four year old sister. We’re thinking of maybe getting a set of beds like this.
But it seems that they are no longer available. Have any of you seen anything similiar and know where to get them? The top bed needs to be lower than a “traditional” bunk bed, and with enough railing to be safe for the four year old, but still have enough room to fit a bed for the one year old. We’re thinking that the bottom bed might be better as a platform bed instead of a raised bed. Any suggestions?
How do you know that he fell out of the cot and didn’t in fact climb down the rails as well as up to get out?
But yeah, babies bounce. They’re pretty resiliant little buggers, and if a fall out of a cot were so serious, I reckon the human race would have become extinct many eons ago.
Normally I’d be with the “don’t fret, babies bounce” crew, but as it happens I have a friend whose older child cracked his collarbone the first time he escaped his cot :eek:
As far as the question in the OP goes, I was going to recommend IKEA, which has (or used to have) a nifty little trundle bed that would go underneath a normal bed, but I can’t see it on the website. In the absence of other options, I’d probably just put an ordinary mattress on the floor.
Glad he’s OK. A two-year-old in our county died after falling out of her crib during the middle of the night (although that was the first time I had heard of something like that happening). Sorry, I don’t know of any beds like the ones you described. We used the crib-mattress-on-the-floor method. You might also consider a crib tent. Sounds like you have a climber on your hands!
We also used the ‘crib mattress on the floor’ idea until we could find a suitable toddler bed. And we made sure the room was completely baby-proofed, shut the door, and let her be.
I’d second this. My mom has a story about coming into my room just in time to see me sliding down the spindles of my crib rails on the outside of my crib and landing on my ass.
No possibility she pulled him out? to play mama and stop him from crying? and then faked sleeping when he wouldnt stop because she didnt want to get in trouble? Sounds like something my sister would’ve done to me!
My oldest daughter was walking at ten months, and climbing out of her crib at a year - the first few times she did it, we thought she had fallen out, but we caught her finally, and she was actually climbing over the railing, and putting her feet between the bars on the mattress. I still can’t understand how she figured that out at only a year. We removed the front of her crib shortly afterwar (it’s designed to turn into a toddler bed).
9 years and two kids later, and I’m no longer surprised at what kids will get up to when they’re motivated.
An ordinary crib would probably have the top rail at about head height, on a four-year-old (remembering that the four-year-old’s probably going to be standing on the floor, not the raised-up mattress inside). I can definitely see a four-year-old helping, but I think the baby would have to already be actively trying to get out.
My five-year-old can juuust about lug her one-year-old brother a couple of metres by the armpits on a flat floor to get him out of her hair (doesn’t work, of course, he always runs straight back) but it’s a big effort. If she tried to get him out of his cot it would probably be more dangerous than him doing it himself, because she’d probably pull him over the side head-first :eek:
