Ben’s Big Boy Bed

OK so Ben is (and has been) able to climb out of his crib for a while now. He still almost exclusively climbs IN, but knowing, as I do, a couple of people whose little ones have had broken limbs (one from climbing out of a crib!) I have some anxiety about continuing to allow Ben to sleep in a crib when he is capable of climbing out. But we were not ready to do his big boy room. It will involve a loft bed and without a bit more cognitive development, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for him to be too far off the ground. So with that in mind, we endeavored to find him a temporary big boy bed (toddler size) this weekend.

We first tried Walmart/Target. Their beds were around $60 but the only choices were dark wood and white. Neither suited and we wanted to find something a bit more to our taste. So we trekked down to IKEA and purchased their SNIGLAR bed which looked perfect. It wasn’t. It was longer than a crib mattress (though the same width??) and on top of that, the single rail was all but useless since the crib mattress came almost to the top of it. Frustrated, we disassembled and got it ready to take back to IKEA (a 40 minute drive, AWESOME).

This morning, I decided to do a last ditch Craigslist search. I’d searched before but found nothing suitable or priced reasonably, but this morning around 7:30 I found one posted less than an hour earlier, for $20 that was perfect. Blonde wood, rails, good condition, for $20. I wrote immediately and within an hour we were cleared to pickup and the pickup was on the way back to IKEA!!

We picked up the new bed, returned the other one and brought it home. Ben was super excited to assemble it and really really pleased when he saw the robot sheets I purchased for him over a year ago. He climbed right in for some photo ops, but by bedtime, he wasn’t so interested and opted for his crib over the BBB. Which is OK … he’s got the option now and we’ll work towards that. I don’t want him growing up too fast anyhow.