Well, it’s now permanent.  On October 11, we asked her if she’d like her bed moved into her room, and she most excitedly said yes.

Pictures and more details after the jump:

Here’s her bed on its way out of our room.  It had previously been in the corner just behind it.  At this point when the pic was taken, I had already moved the chair into the corner and pushed the dresser over a bit — which was necessary in order for there to be enough space to get the bed out the door!

All the laundry everywhere had been piled up on her (unused for nearly 2 weeks) bed, and has since been put away.  Honest.

Taken apart, the bed makes its way easily into her room.

Here it is all moved into place and made up.  One big advantage of the move is that this bed has a smaller footprint than the floor mattress did.  So she now has more floorspace, as well as underbed storage!

Pomme christens her new sleeping arrangements by jumping on the bed, of course.  In high heels, no less.

One last pic, the bed is now all made up and properly covered and surrounded with stuffed toys and dolls.

We love this bed, it’s an Ikea Kritter.  It’s larger than a typical toddler bed, but smaller than a twin size.  So it’s great for a toddler, great for saving space, but is still big enough to last her well into childhood.  The only real drawback of it is, in fact, its unusual size.  Only Ikea’s own sheets fit — and we only have the fitted sheets.  We use no top sheet at all for now, and we have to fold a twin-sized comforter in half and place it sideways, or else stuff all the extra comforter down the back.

Still, it’s a small price to pay, it’s such a great bed otherwise.

As for her sleeping itself?  Well, I have to say it’s mostly good news.  There are, of course, nights where she still takes hours to go to sleep, fussing and whining the whole time, while hubby and I take turns sitting with her.  And there are nights where she drifts gently off to sleep while we’re still reading a story.  Most nights are somewhere in the middle.  She’s generally calm, but squirms and fusses quite a bit when it’s actually time to settle down to sleep.  Until she holds still for a few moments, then she’s out like a light.

But, even with rough nights where she just doesn’t want to actually sleep, she has never, ever, tried to just keep getting out of bed, or whine that she doesn’t want the bed in her room, or cry that she wants to sleep in our room instead.

These problems seem to mostly be in the realm of the child who has been made to sleep in their own room since birth.  I won’t be so presumtuous as to say it never happens with co-sleeping “graduates.”  But I do think it’s not an unreasonable observation, that children who have had their needs for dependence and security at night met in infancy and toddlerhood, and not rushed into sleep independence, are therefore more secure and confident when the time actually comes.  The need, once filled, is no longer an issue.

On the other hand, babies made to sleep independently from the beginning, often with “cry-it-out” methods, learn that bedtime is a scary time, a confrontational time, a battle of wills between parents and child, a time of parental withdrawal and abandonment.  As soon as they’re old enough to “fight back”… well, they do.  Over-generalization?  Maybe.  But often seen.

However, within a few days, she wanted back into her own room again, and has stayed there ever since.   I think that means it’s been a whole week in a row now?

Getting her to sleep is getting easier, as well.  I wouldn’t say easy, she still would obviously prefer to stay up!  But she doesn’t fight staying in bed.  She squirms and fidgets and fusses a bit, but never tries to get up and leave.  She’s completely co-operative as far as getting ready for bed and getting into bed — it’s just the falling asleep part she resists!

Most nights it has ended up being daddy who stays with her until she falls asleep.  When I stay with her, she sometimes just wants to nurse, and (sadly, I confess, with some sense of guilt but knowing I need it for my sanity) I’m deliberately weaning her from the bedtime nurse.  She will usually accept a glass of milk instead, and/or merely holding the booby (what a lifesaver that trick has been!), but sometimes she’s still just too wound up when it’s mommy around.

Of course, the occasional evening when daddy gives up on her EVER settling down, so I go in to take a shift — she settles for me practically instantly, leaving him shaking his head in bewilderment over my magic mommy powers.

And that’s how it generally goes… she fidgets, fusses, squirms, kicks, rolls, chatters, plays, and then as soon as she settles and stays still for more than about 5 seconds, she is OUT.  Asleep, off to dreamland, dead to the world, just like that.

She will stay in her room until anywhere from 1am until 7am, but usually joining us sometime between 3-5am, after going to sleep around 9-9:30pm.  After the adventure of her heading downstairs looking for us one night early on, we invested in a nice pressure-mounted baby gate to block off the bedroom hallway once we all go to bed.  Most nights she comes in to our room on her own, occasionally she wakes us up with a single cry — just enough to alert us to her state of wakefulness and await our arrival to rescue her.  She is not scared to wake up alone, not since the first night or two when it was new and unfamiliar.

Her bed in our room has quickly turned into a storage area for laundry waiting to be sorted, and a favourite nesting spot for the cats.  One more week of this, however, and we will move it into her room… the final step in the grand process of her achieving Nighttime Independence.

Well, technically I guess you could say the final step is when she stays in her room all night, every night, and even takes herself to the bathroom (usually she tells us when she comes in that she needs to pee so we just do a quick potty with the BBLP) and back to her own bed… But those are all things she will just do on her own at some point, and there’s not much we can do to either accellerate or delay it.  Moving her “real” bed into her bedroom is the last concrete thing that we need to do.

Just thinking about it, it feels so final, so like an ending.  But really, it’s a beginning, as she takes another big step leaving babyhood and entering true childhood.  And she will always be welcome back into our bed, whensoever she needs it.

I posted last night about how sweet little Pomme, not yet three years old, asked to go to sleep in her own room.  Not only asked, but also accomplished.  I wasn’t sure what was going to happen if she woke up during the night.  Would she be disoriented?  Scared?

Well, in fact she slept soundly until 6am.  That’s when hubby and I were awakened by a short little cry.  Before we even had time to get up and go to her, however, she had arrived in our room and was clambering up into bed.  Just one little cry was all she let out.  She seemed a little bit scared, and when I asked her if she was scared to wake up by herself in her room, she said yes.  But when I also asked if she had a good sleep and liked it in her room, she also said yes.

She nursed back to sleep cuddled with me, and we slept until 9am.  Hurray for homeschooling and sleeping in!

So the next question was going to be, what happens tonight?  Will she want to try it again, or was it a one-off?

When bedtime came around, she was pretty cranky, and announced quite strongly that she did not want to sleep in either room, thank you very much.  So we decided to keep things simple and just use her bed in our room.  So of course, then she says she wants to sleep in her room.

Like last night, it still took awhile before she settled down.  She helped her doggie doll go to sleep.  She had a glass of milk.  She wanted to read a book.  She wanted daddy.  She wanted daddy to leave.  She wanted daddy to come back.

But settle down she did, and fell asleep cuddled with daddy.

My first impression when she asked to go to her own room, was that it was another delaying tactic.  But if that were the case, then you would expect her to ask to go to our room at a later point, trying the same tactic again in reverse.  She didn’t do that.  Not tonight, and not last night.  Once in her room, she settled down fairly quickly and fell asleep comfortably.

And to add to the “growing up too fast” list — her first dance class is tomorrow morning.  Hopefully she’ll have a good night’s sleep!

Backstory:

She has a bed in our room.  We co-slept since birth, then around 14mo we added a sidecarred bed for her to start the night in.  We moved it across the room just a few months ago, when she was about 2.5yo.  She gets up and joins us in our bed about 25-30% of the time, the rest of the time now she sleeps all night in her bed — even resettling herself sometimes after sitting up awake in the night.

She’s also had a floor bed in her own room since we moved into this house a year ago. We used to use it for naps, just to get her used to the idea of sleeping in there, but she hasn’t had regular naps for a long time. When she does nap these days, we’ve just put her in her bed in our room.

We’ve been working on giving her a real ‘bedtime routine’ lately.  Up until recently, we would just nurse her down or wear her and go for a walk, when we saw that she was getting tired.  Now that she’s getting older, though – she’s 33 months – she’s become more resistant.  She wants to fight sleep, she wants to stay up and do stuff.  Nursing to sleep doesn’t always work anymore, and she’ll refuse to go in the sling because she knows what it means.

We found that we were staying up past midnight (we’re night owls so that in itself wasn’t a problem), with an overtired, cranky child who then was even harder to get to sleep.  So it was time to start a real “bedtime routine”, at a time when we thought she actually was tired but before she got overtired.

So around 8:30, we put on her pj’s, brush her teeth, maybe read a book, then go lie down in her bed in our room.  This last was especially a new part — normally we just let her go to sleep wherever, usually in our arms, and then plop her into her bed once she’s down.  Seriously, “plopping” best describes it.  I could practically throw her into bed and at most, she’d stir, shift, shuffle, and settle.

But with the previous nursing to sleep and cuddling no longer being a guarantee, it was time to ‘graduate’ to actually going to sleep in her bed!

She took to it quite quickly, with relatively little drama — at first.  Some nights, I nursed her down in her bed.  Other nights, we just cuddled.  She was usually upset at having to go to bed, but would settle within 5-10 minutes and drift off to sleep.

Then I decided I was ready to get rid of the bedtime nursing… it didn’t work for sleeping, in fact it tended to keep her awake, and I found it very irritating.  I’m trying so hard to let her self-wean, go as long as she wants to, and we’ve made it farther than I did with Flipper (I had weaned him just around 2.5yo) but I’m afraid that I’m hitting my limit.  I actually don’t mind middle-of-the-night nursing, but the bedtime one was time to go.  I knew that she didn’t really need it to get to sleep, there were so many nights that we didn’t use it at all, so it was just a matter of having that happen every night.

The first night that I actually refused (promising we’d nurse later), she took it well, just held the boob instead.  The second night, she cried.     That heartbroken cry.  We cuddled, I consoled, daddy cuddled, and she did eventually settle.  It actually wasn’t too bad – if she hadn’t settled quickly I would have let her nurse.  But she was okay.  She expressed her disappointment, then accepted the alternatives.  It still took her a little while to settle, but what we’ve noticed is that as soon as she’s able to hold herself still for more than 5 seconds, she drops out cold.  So it’s simply a matter of sitting with her and reminding her to be still, until she settles enough to let herself sleep.

Well, that was last night.  Tonight, I was proactive and offered a glass of milk before we even got to that stage.  She drank it up eagerly.  Then the squirming stage started.  She’d lie down, but play with her dolls.  Or sit up to grab a book that had fallen beside the bed.  Or turn around to cuddle with daddy.  Or stick her bum up in the air.  Or fiddle with her blankets.

Then she said, “I want to sleep in my room.”

I wasn’t ready for this one.  I thought it was probably just another delaying tactic.  We’ve suggested it to her before, asked if she’d like to try sleeping in her room, and she always said ‘no’.  That’s fine, I knew she just wasn’t ready yet.  But, since she asked… we went with it — we told her that she had to settle and be still, or we’d just come back to our room. She said okay, so we went with it.

Well, it still took her a few minutes to settle, but she did. And she fell asleep.

I’m actually not quite sure how to feel about this.  On the one hand, it’s great!  My baby is growing up, she’s secure and independent, we have even more privacy in the bedroom, and of course it’s “proof” that nighttime attachment parenting does not mean that your child will still be in your bed when they’re in college!

On the other hand, it’s harder to keep an eye on her.  She might decide to get up and play (in fact, before we went to her room, I talked about what would happen if she woke up in the night – to make sure she understood she could come into our room. “What will you do if you wake up and you’re in your room?” “Play!”) — or go wandering through the house unsupervised.  She’s recently managed to open the front door, even when it’s locked.  We’ll probably get a deadbolt or chain lock to prevent unwanted escapes, but we haven’t done that yet.  I might not sleep as well, knowing that she’s in a completely separate room.  I’ll be half-awake all night listening for her!

I knew this would happen eventually.  I was even looking forward to it in many ways.  I just wasn’t expecting this yet.

Well, we’ll see how it goes tonight… 10 to one odds I’m getting up at 3am to go rescue her when she wakes up and starts crying because she’s in an unfamiliar environment… And we’ve put a big box across the hallway so she doesn’t go wandering through the house, because we don’t have baby gates anymore!

And who knows what will happen tomorrow night.  This might be a one-time event, not to be repeated until she’s 6.  Or it might be the start of a gradual shift, some nights here, some nights there.  Or it might be the beginning of a sudden change, and we’ll end up moving her nicer bed into her room.  I honestly have no idea.

Whatever happens, though, it’s okay.  We’ve followed her lead.  I moved her bed across the room when I sensed, from her sleeping patterns, that she was ready for it, and sure enough she started sleeping all night almost every night and had no problems toddling across the room to me when she did need me.  And now we’ve put her in her own room, not for our convenience, or out of some sense of needing to force independence on young children… but because she wanted to.  She was ready to try it, on her own schedule and her own terms.  Once again, she proves that young children desire independence and will even demand it when they’re developmentally ready, all we need to give is the opportunity and the freedom to try things.  No pressure, no games.