It's the end of the sleep as we know it

While the impending arrival of Jacob’s sibling will certainly put a wrench in our sleep, Josh and I have made a conscious choice to alter our ability to get a good night’s sleep for the next, oh, lifetime. This weekend, we purchased and assembled a bed for Jacob. WITHOUT BARS.

You see, when your child is in a crib, you know exactly where they are. And once they are past the SIDS stage, and you keep the knives out of reach, they are pretty much as safe as it’s gonna get in their little wooden cage. That is, until they pull off their diaper and smear poop on the wall and maybe eat some of it, but that only happened once, I SWEAR.

At first, he was not impressed and did NOT appreciate our messing around with his room without a toddler change management permit. We tried to win him over with talk of a “big boy bed,” but he couldn’t care less. This is one of the many things about Jacob that I love. He sits there sucking his thumb, fiddling with his ear, never trying to crawl out of the crib, never wanting to be bigger than he is. I need to remember to savor this when he wants to drive at 13 and get married at 30 (just kidding!).

Once the bed was set up, he came in again and loved it. He rolled around and played “sleep,” directing me to “Take you glasses off, Mama,” knowing that if I’m wearing my specs, I’m not really sleeping.

This is the end of an era. Once he is fully sleeping in his bed (we are in a slow transition starting with weekend naps and building up to week nights), there is nothing to stop him from getting out of it, other then abject fear, and I still want to save that parenting technique for a rainy day. So we’ll have to lock the baby gate, close the doors and hope he doesn’t learn to climb up to the high shelf that stores the bathroom chemicals while we snooze away.

Sometimes, on the weekends, Josh and I sleep through Jacob's initial wakings and he falls back asleep. Those days are long gone, my friends. A new day will come soon when I will wake up with a little toddler face near mine, and who knows how long he’ll have been there, my three foot stalker watching me sleep. And after I stop hyperventilating, he’ll say, “You awake?” and I’ll see that it’s 5:30 am, and I will have to be awake, won’t I?