Gearing up for the Big Boy Bed

This morning, a giggling Andrew bounced up onto my bed and crawled under the covers with me. "Mommy," he announced. "I want a big boy bed. Like William's.

This is the second time in about four days that he has made this announcement. I think he's serious.

William never tried to climb out of his crib, so we kept him in the crib for an unusually long time. In fact, he got his big boy bed about a month before his third birthday. We actually kept the crib in his room for another nine months or so because we didn't want to get rid of it but didn't know where else to put it. But he got to sleep in a twin bed on the other side of the room. And oh, how he loved it.

Andrew doesn't exactly try to climb out of the crib, but he throws his leg over the rail so that William can easily tow him over and out. They started this little routine about a month or so ago. Mr. Social Butterfly gets up fairly early each morning, but apparently, he gets lonely. So he started venturing into his little brother's room and helping Andrew get down from his crib so he'd have someone to hang out with. Andrew now expects this.  David reported that this morning, Andrew wasn't messing around. He was issuing a royal demand, calling, "William! William Wyckoff! Come get me! William Wyckoff!"

I think the boy needs a big boy bed of his very own. I've notified him that he has to give up his nighttime binky once and for all when he moves into a big boy bed. I don't know if that's really sunk in. And I've told him that big boys also use the potty. I know that he knows that, but he is cheerfully content to stick to his own agenda on the potty-training front. Which is to say that he will do it on his own time. Whenever that may be. (Insert resigned eye-roll here.)

I'm totally fine with getting him a big boy bed, but there is a complicating factor at work now. When William gave up the crib, we knew we needed to hold onto the crib. We were planning to eventually have another baby. But Andrew is it for us. No more babies. We don't need to hang onto the crib anymore, but it's going to be very hard to get rid of it. It's a drop-side crib that we ordered from Albee Baby in early 2006. A few years ago, after William was finished with the crib, the Consumer Product Safety Commission began to ban drop-side cribs because of a series of infant deaths. Ours was never recalled. It was and is very sturdy. But the facts remain. We can't sell it or donate it. We basically just have to throw it away. And it's huge. How do you throw away something so large? (And also so nice. It really is a nice crib. I just hate to toss something that never gave us any trouble.) We investigated the possibility of getting a conversion kit, but apparently it's not so easy to procure that sort of thing seven years later. So, oh well. I wouldn't want someone to take a chance on it, obviously, so we will get rid of it.

So the plan is to haul my mother-in-law's second twin bed out of storage, try to polish it up a bit, and then buy a new mattress and linens for Andrew. And I guess we'll take apart the crib and find some way to get it to the junkyard.

Andrew wants sheets "like William's." William currently has Pottery Barn Kids sheets on his bed; he rotates between the National League baseball sheets, the American League baseball sheets, and the Star Wars sheets. Guess I'll take Andrew shopping sometime soon and let him pick out something.