We don't know what to do about the bed.
We are comfortable with our family bed. Our house is tiny, and it didn't make sense to give the little person a big room while the two big people had to share. So we all sleep in the same room, partly because we have a teeny tiny house and partly because we like it. Mostly because we like it.
It took us awhile to get comfortable with the family bed. We have a queen, and by the time Naomi was 3 months old, it wasn't big enough to fit all of us comfortably. We went through a phase of musical beds familiar to anyone whose done the family bed thing. There was a twin bed in the other bedroom, you know, the bedroom that had the expensive cat bed crib. Josh would spend the night there sometimes, or if I knew it was going to be a fussy night, Naomi and I would spend the night there.
Around six months we had a brainwave. We said fuck the crib, dismantled it, and stowed it in the basement where it has accrued two years worth of mold and water damage. We moved the twin bed to our bedroom and affixed it to the queen with nylon straps and rope. I fashioned a gigantic fitted sheet out of a twin sheet and a queen sheet. The we rolled around on our giant bed and decided to have triplets. We made the other bedroom into a TV/toy room.
A year later, I decided Naomi should have her own space. We took the twin bed off the frame and set the box spring on the floor, as flush as possible against the queen. Now Naomi has her little grotto against the wall, a sunken little bed spot that she loves to call her own.
Now that we have Newbie coming, and we know from experience the queen bed will be inadequate, we have a few choices.
1. Get a kind size bed already. Really, what dedicated family bedder doens't have a king size bed? Problem is, we have a 150 year old staircase which barely allowed the queen size mattress through. There is enough space in the room, but getting it there would be a problem. So no king size bed, unless we wanted to get two twins and put them on a king frame with king sheets and have a pseudo king bed...
2. Haul out the old co-sleeper that I was obsessed with during my last pregnancy. Maybe, this time, it will be more than a glorified diaper holder and bedside table. But I doubt it. If I can't feel my little baby next to me, I constantly wake up to see where s/he is. I'd end up half in the cosleeper, and I'm pretty sure that half of me is significantly over the weight limit.
3. Rearrange the whole room so that Naomi has her own space and a cute bed from IKEA(it's a fairly large bedroom), and we start over from square 1 with the modular family bed. So if she wants to crawl into bed with us there's room, but she has her own space. The risk is that she'll hate her own space and we'll have rearranged the whole room for nothing. By the time she likes it, she'll have grown out of the toddler bed. The other downside is that the only toddler bed that will fit in the space is the super narrow one, and I just don't see her staying on it.
What we'll probably end up doing is that good old stand-by: NOTHING. We'll wait and see how things shake out, who needs what, and what can be done, after the baby comes. Isn't this exciting?
Hmmm. Since i've never had a family bed, i don't know.. but I assume I'd go with the old "do nothing' stand by.
Posted by: korin | Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 06:00 PM
Do nothing! You never know how either kid is going to react to the new situation, so probably best to wait. We started out with a full size and it was very quickly too small for us. Now we have two full size beds pushed together and it's a dream, lots and lots of space, it's endless bed, wall-to-wall bed! Of course, it also takes up almost the whole room... Still, we love it.
Posted by: Aimee | Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 08:28 PM
Vote 3 for do nothing. But, on a side note, I live in a 137 year old house, and we got our king upstairs without trouble because the box springs are twins and the king mattress is pretty flexible. Just a thought.
Posted by: Running2Ks | Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 09:02 PM
If you want to do something, how about putting your matress/boxsprings and a twin matress/boxsprings on the floor and not use a frame?
Posted by: julie | Thursday, June 30, 2005 at 09:14 PM
I vote for do-nothing too.
I remember how bitter I was about the crib when Frances refused to sleep in it. She had such a nice room and all we ever did there was change her diapers....
Of course now she does sleep in her crib, and I'm mighty glad b/c the family bed thing was no longer working for us. But I think next time (if there is one) I'll be a bit more realistic in my expectations of the crib. And get a more comfortable bed so it's not such a PITA to share it.
Posted by: Andrea | Friday, July 01, 2005 at 07:33 AM
Followed your link from getupgrrl
Instead of a king mattress, get 2 twins & one of those "connector" deals so you don't have a valley in the middle.
That's what I'd do, if I had a b.r. big enough for a king! (sigh...) Wish we could make co-sleeping really work for us. DH doesn't sleep well w/ the green bean, so she & I are in one bed, he's in the guest bed in another room, pretty much permanently. If we could have a king mattress it might help. Queen is definitely too small!
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