Roaming

While Nico's transition to the big boy bed has gone very well overall, there's been one hitch - he no longer sleeps through the night. In his crib, he was reliably going down around 8:30 PM and sleeping until at least 7:30 AM. Once we got him into the big boy bed, he started waking up at least once, usually between 3 and 5 in the morning. I suspect he did this in the crib, too, but knew to just roll over and go back to sleep. In the big bed, not so much. In an effort to keep him in his room, at first I'd latch the baby gate every night. This resulted in him standing at the baby gate and crying for me at 3 AM and also sometimes 5 AM, until I dragged myself in there. He'd usually request that I lay down with him in his bed, which is sort of an okay solution, but after dozing off in there I'd usually wake up ridiculously stiff and not well-rested.

One night I forgot to latch the baby gate and so upon waking, Nico quietly came into our room and crawled up into our bed. There was so little fuss and drama that I decided maybe this was a better solution and started leaving the gate unlatched on purpose. I know eventually I'm going to need to deal with this nighttime bed-hopping, but I just keep hoping it's a phase that'll pass. So far all his other weird / maddening sleep issues have turned out to be passing phases, so I have a bit of hope. Anyway, this usually works out great because Nico will join us in bed around 5:00, MB will get up around 5:45, and then N and I sleep on until whatever time we get up for me to go to work. Except sometimes Nico wakes up before me and I'm a heavy enough sleeper that he can slip out of bed mostly unnoticed and go about his toddler business. The first few times he did this, it worked out okay. I woke up to him carrying around toys that he'd brought up from downstairs, or once to a pile of books he'd brought up and tossed onto the bed in an apparent attempt to coax me to read them.

Today when I half-woke and noticed he'd left the bed, I foolishly assumed he was off on a toy-procuring mission and went back to sleep. Some time later, he came into the bedroom and presented me with a long ragged scrap of thick paper. Rudely awakened, terribly nearsighted without my glasses, I frowned at this out-of-place thing. "What is this?" I asked Nico. It felt like wallpaper, and I had a sudden horrible thought that he'd pulled a big strip of wallpaper off the wall in the downstairs bathroom. Panicking slightly, I demanded, "Where did you get this?"

"Downstairs," Nico answered. "With the others." I got out of bed and got my glasses on, and then I realized the scrap wasn't wallpaper. It was a scrap of ancient, sun-brittle window blind. Oh.

My best guess is that Nico was trying to see out the staircase window and was a little too vigorous with our ancient roll-up blind. When a huge portion of it ripped free in his hands, he proceeded to shred it into little bitty pieces. As one does, I suppose.

I probably should've been more stern about this, but I wasn't sure how to react. On the one hand, destroying stuff in the house is Bad and should be Heavily Discouraged. On the other, it was a half-falling-apart old blind and it could've been worse and as peeved as I was, it was also kind of funny. I finally decided to make him sit on his time-out chair while I cleaned up the mess, but didn't make too much of a big deal out of it. I guess I'm going to have to start latching the baby gate again. Or getting up early with Nico to supervise his shenanigans. Or maybe I can just sew cat bells into the hems of all his pajamas.