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Jeff Stimpson, 39, has been a working journalist for 15 years. He lives in New York with his wife Jill and sons Alex, 3, and Edwin, four months. He maintains a site of essays, Jeff's Life, at:
http://www.jeffslife.com
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Monthly Column... |
by
Jeff Stimpson
The time has come to get Alex to sleep in a bed.
The reasons are compelling: our unforgiving wooden floor, the height of the crib, Alex being an excellent climber but a poor flyer.
Crib to bed is a leap, one of the broadest. It suddenly seems to me that parents talk about it only sentimentally. They say it seems like yesterday that they rocked their newborn to sleep in his cradle by their bedside at home. When Alex was a week old he lived in a plastic box with a hospital vent down his throat. That doesn't seem like yesterday, though I can still see the box and the vent. When did that thin infant crawl from there and suddenly need a bed?
This transition is big as learning to walk, Jill thinks, and just as complicated as we try to iron out the best way to keep a bouncy Alex on his mattress.
We work every angle. I put the city-country-scene sheet on Alex's bed (this sheet fascinates him). Also, only Ned rides a stroller on our weekend outings; we walk Alex everywhere. He needs the practice, he needs the exercise, and we need him exhausted by 7 p.m. We set up the boys' bedroom with dimmed lights and a tape of guitar lullabies purring in the air.
I tell Alex "Go to bed," and he heads right for the bed, climbs right up on it -- good boy -- for five seconds, before he bounces down again and scoots for the living room. I take his hand and guide him back. He crawls up onto the mattress and burrows his face into the blankets. But he's like a new computer owner on the Internet; temptation is too strong.
Off the mattress come the legs. I take his hand and guide him back, over and over, to the dimness and the guitar kisses.
"Let him just run around until he gets sick of it," say Aunt Julie.
I fortify the edge of the bed with blankets and pillows. Jill spreads blankets across the floor about where Alex might tumble out. If he keeps hopping out, we're going to have put him in the portable playpen: an incalculable step backward. I tuck him in. Maybe being tucked in is another key factor, I tell Jill. Maybe, she admits. We make the bed to resemble his crib (now owned by Ned, who somewhere during this has dropped off): same blankets, Elmo to hug, one of our T shirts to snuggle, just like we used to make up the pet carrier to take the cat to the vet. "Alex, you want to help me with this?" I ask, as always, slipping his cannula over his head.
When I spy Alex a moment later, as I'm returning from the kitchen and he's mid-way in his flight to the living room, I see him pause and carefully work the cannula off over his head. Then he's gone like a deer.
"Alex, back to bed."
"I think he just wants us in there while he makes this transition," Jill says. Alex takes my hand as if to say, "Oh yeah, bed. Good idea." He squirms up and buries his face in the sheet. I knew that sheet would work, I say to myself as I head to the kitchen.
About a year later, Alex is still up and hopping. I try one more trip to the bed before resorting to the portable crib. He settles down on the bed without hesitation, and goes to sleep as if this is where he's wanted to be all evening long. Soon he's sprawled and limp as a noodle.
"You were worried he wouldn't fall asleep in the bed?" Jill says. "Maybe that's what we need: One of us has to be convinced it will never happen."
She has several observations about this bed fracas: He may not sleep in the bed tomorrow night, or the next night. But in six months, Jill thinks he will be sleeping there. He's also not "lying in there in wild, crazy baby positions," Jill notes, "with his feet up here and his head down there. He knows he's not in the crib." (I note that at about 9 p.m., I find him sinking into the gap between the wall and the mattress.)
I tell Jill that 7:30 is one thing, but we must be prepared for the middle of the night, when Alex wakes up and finds nothing between him and an Elmo video but a scamper to the TV.
Let's just say an exhausted boy gets on the school bus the next day.
I call to check on him, and ask his teacher for advice on the bed front. "With my two kids, I put up the railing and they stayed right there," she recalls. "They weren't climbers." I reply that Alex is definitely a climber. "Yes," she says, "and he's a good climber. I'd be worried about that crib."
We are, for more than one reason.
Copyright 2001 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
J
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