two in the bed
October 26, 2011
last saturday (22nd october 2011) paul and i re-arranged the kids bedroom while they were spending the day at their grandparents home. we had primed them prior, so they new they’d be coming home to a change.
what was so important it required a couple of hours of hefting and lifting and fiddling and cleaning? the answer is ‘new sleeping arrangements’! tally has outgrown the cot. the cot does have an additional bit that will stretch it to a small single bed but, as you might remember, percy occupies a double bed all on her ownsome. not any more she don’t. now percy and tally sleep across the double bed together.
that is, when they do actually sleep. paul very wisely kept the mattress from the cot and stored it under percy’s bed. on this mattress, on their bedroom floor, is where we finally got tally to fall asleep on sunday nite. then we lifted him back into the big bed.
there is no cot in our house now. it’s packed down in the shed. (well, it’s sort of packed down in the shed. even with my superior packing skills i couldn’t get all the parts back in the original box. even with paul’s superior “googling it” skills, he couldn’t find any tips or instructions.) with foresight that was i’m sure unintended and unrealised paul got the cot into pieces, ready for packing, before i was free to help. i had no opportunity to say goodbye. say goodbye to a piece of furniture??! well, yes. both our babies slept in that cot and i’ve stood beside it rocking tousled heads, singing atrociously or leaned over it stroking brows and gazing with stupefied exhausted love at our babies for more hours than i can count. it has an attached significance because of the precious cargo it carried, far beyond its use as a nice looking cot. once it was busted up into its different parts, it kind of wasn’t the cot it used to be. so as i entered the dining room where the dismantling had taken place, i paused, drew a breath, said “oh”, nearly leaked a tear and then said a silent goodbye to tiny babies in enormous cots, to growing babies and to toddlers standing and hollering over the side to be let out. no more of that for us.
so how’s the co-sleeping going? pretty good. we did psych ourselves up for a week or two of incessant fighting, hair pulling, bouncing on each other, blanket snatching, eye-poking and general unpleasantness, and we’re only half a week into that period. sunday and monday nite tally went to sleep on the mattress on the floor first. because he was bugging percy too much and not settling down. last nite he buggered around for a short while before falling asleep in the big bed. i’m going to call that progress.
one negative that has come to light is that of tally losing his stuffed toy companion, rocco. i expect in the cot if he let go of him while sleeping rocco didn’t move far because there was no space for him to do so. last nite, twice tally got us up to help him hunt down rocco, who had wriggled his way out of hands reach under the blanket. hmmmm…tie rocco to tally? probably not wise.
