BIG BOY BED

[nathan_smom]

HI Ladies
I am sure there have been very  many questions about transitioning from crib to bed. Its been about 4 days now, and it still is taking us close to an hour to finally get DS to sleep in bed. Is this normal to take so long? Also, he is ina  new room and has a month old sister!! SO I know things are a little crazy in his world, but I dont want to start and AP'ing...KWIM.

We usually do our reg wind down routine and then when its time for us to leave the room, say good night, say stay in bed for the umpteenth time that day, he looks us in the face and says OK, stay in bed!!  THEN, after not even thirty seconds, he makes his way out of the room to greet me in the hallway with a big HHIII! I take him, lead him back to his bed and start over with the goodnight. Today my DH was in there with him for his nap. He had to sit on end of bed for abut forty min. with him. We do not want to lay down with him to start bad habits, but find if we sit in the room and dont ket him get in/out of bed hundreds of times, he can settle better.

Am I doing this correctly???!!!!

[ryan's mum]

I never had this problem as Ryan was 15 months going into a big bed but I think the general idea is you just take him right back to bed just as you're doing ,it will take a while initially but he should get bored of it  , Just keep saying the same thing over when you do take him back and don't engage in any conversation with him so he knows it's not a game . If you can help it you deff don't want to be sitting in there with him , i know it gets them to settle quicker but it took a lot of sleep training for me to be able to leave Ryan alone in his room when I stayed with him in the bad reflux days

[Mydreamcametrue]

Hey Robin:  For whatever reason I never had an issue with Zach, I think because he likes sleep so much and we made it a HUGE deal that he got a big boy bed.

Do  you shut his door at night?  I have a friend that her son is a lot like yours.  Very active, spirited.  Well she had a had time with the transition, but bascially she made sure his room was compelety child proof, had safe toys in there, a night light and once she put him to bed, she shut the door and DID NOT GO BACK. 

She is not a Baby Whisperer follower, so if he cried, she let him cry (unless it was really bad) and also she has a video monitor in there so she can she what he is doing.

He may just need time to adjust and now that he has the freedom to get up whenever, he may do that at first.

I know with her son, he would get up as soon as she put him down and play for like an hour before going to bed. 

You may want to try the bedtime chart I did with timer.  On your chart, you could always put the last thing you do is BED, Story and then set the timer for say 10 minutes for Mommy to stay, but when it goes off, Mommy leaves.  It took us 3 days and that was it for the timer and chart to work, he know longer throws a fit at all.

i hope this helps some.