What a Life!

Ben is funny when he wakes up in the morning. If you go in to get him as soon as you hear him, he is grumpy because you went in too quickly and he didn’t have time to “wake up.” But if you give him too much time to “wake up,” he is grumpy because you didn’t come in and get him soon enough.

He’s 2 1/2 now, and I’ve simply gotten tired of this routine. We bought the mattress for the crib at a garage sale and it was sold with a toddler bed, which was taking up space in the closet. I’ve been threatening to assemble it in hopes that since he could get himself out of bed, we would solve our morning routine problem. But I just hadn’t gotten around to it…

Last week, I decided it was time. I got the frame out and assembled it. I moved the mattress from the crib over to the toddler bed. Then I explain to Ben that this was his new bed. Here he is, checking it out:

They have a very clear warning on the bed frame that children should not be allowed to jump on the bed. Well, a few moments after the blissful checking-it-out process pictured above began, Ben decided that he was very excited to have a new bed. And what do you do when you’re a toddler and you’re excited? You jump up and down…on your new bed. Gracious!

When he is bad, we always send him to his room and explain to him that he can come out when he is ready to be cheerful (aka not crying) and [fill in whatever he was supposed to be doing, like listening to Mommy and playing with his cars on the floor and not the walls]. It works very well…except when the naughtiness is happening in the room to which he is sent. Not good.

After the initial exercise, though, he stopped jumping on the bed and we haven’t had any trouble since. We also haven’t had any trouble putting him to bed.

But in the morning when he gets up, I’m not sure if he has quite figured out yet that he can get himself up and come find me when he’s ready to get up. Seriously. He will literally spend an hour lying on his bed singing when he wakes up. If I ever left him in bed that long in his crib, I paid for it by having to deal with a very grumpy child.

The first morning, I heard the singing move so I went up to investigate and he was on his hands and knees in front of the Christmas tree, singing, of course. He saw me and immediately went crawling back to his bed where he stayed and sang for another half hour. He’s had the new bed for about a week now, and he never gets up until I come up and open up his door and peek in, even though the door is set so he can open it and come down and find me whenever he wants. I simply do not understand it.

Here is a picture of the crib now without a mattress. It doesn’t look too bad because I made a skirt for it to coordinate with the curtains before he was born. Just the same, it is rather empty and lonely.