Doing in my head. From cot to bed

Travis Bull from tacklenappy.com is expecting his second child shortly. With a heavily pregnant wife and toddler still in the cot, they have their work cut out to get ready in time.

Toddlers don’t handle change well. If you change their routine they cry, if you introduce a new element or flavour to their nightly meal they usually cry and when you try to change their bedroom you better have your industrial strength ear plugs at the ready.

So there we were thinking we had a few weeks to get your toddler ready for baby number two only to be told by the obstetrician that our econd baby was going to come a few weeks earlier than planned. We hadn’t moved our  2.5 year old toddler out of the nursery. Add to that she still sleeps in the cot. Add to that her new bedroom looks like a room from the early stages of the Block. Not a very nice predicament to be in I can assure you of that.

So there we were with about a week to turn the spare room into a princess fairy palace (or similar). Our first step was to move the unwanted furniture out.  My wife’s instructions were simple “Get it out!”. What every pregnant woman says she wants to do at 36 weeks (usually she is not referring to the furniture and stuff in the spare room).

Then we had to consider how we could get Miss 2 out of the cot. We wanted to do this prior to the baby coming along as we don’t want to create any feelings of displacement. The years of therapy involved as a result of toddler displacement because of a sibling are too great.

 I went down to get a toddler bed one that was on special and then we tried to put it together. Unfortunately like all fightpacks, er I mean flat packs they never assemble properly and a job I should have been able to do myself turned into a two person job taking about 3 hours and plenty of swearing, lucky we waited till Miss 2 had gone to bed.

The next day was a work day so I was expecting to set up the bedroom when I got home, however my wife had disobeyed my instructions of “sit on the couch” and had rearranged and redecorated the room. It looked awesome.

When we showed our daughter she was so excited by her new room and big girl bed.

Bed time, however did not go well at all.

It was ear plug time and after 5 trips to the potty, 9 Grug books, 4 visits from my wife and 4 from me and over 2 hours of high pitched screaming we pulled the plug. She was not going to sleep so we set up the cot again and put her back in her own room. Like a struggling footy coach we will be taking it one day at a time. We can only imagine what we are in for when the baby arrives.  

How did you handle the cot/bed transition? The introduction of number 2?

You can follow Travis Bull  on Tacklenappy.com or follow their Facebook page here