Big Girl Bed

With the arrival of another child in the near future it was time to go shopping for "big girl" furniture for Claire. This was not quite as easy as when we bought Sam his furniture for a couple of reasons. One, we were now going furniture shopping with two rambunctious kids rather than just one. Two, since we are giving up our guest bedroom for this baby we are giving Claire the queen size bed from the guest room so that when we do have guests they can sleep in her room. This caused lots of problems b/c kids furniture does not make queen size bed frames. We threw around lots of ideas including just getting her a toddler bed and pulling the queen mattress out of the attic when guests come but in the end we decided to get her an queen sized frame with matching dresser and night stand. To do this though we had to buy her adult furniture rather than kid furniture. Her new dresser and headboard are huge and will look enormous compared to her but our hope is that she will have it for the next 20 years at least. Afterall, our current guest bedroom is made up of furniture that I had when I was in elementary school. Our greatest fear is that our terrible little sleeper will quickly figure out that she can actually get out of her bed in the middle of the night rather than screaming for us to come to her. Her furniture won't be delivered until early August and in the meantime we are planning on putting her in a regular bed while we're on vacation just as a test run. We are even hoping that she and Sam will sleep together on vacation and that when we move her to a big bed Sam might sleep with her at night as well. Hopefully sleeping together will help both of them sleep well at night although we recognize that this could very easily backfire and I think that will be apparent in the first night or two. In the meantime, she will be in her crib and I imagine I will continue to go up and console her when she screams in the middle of the night.