Big boy bed!

James's Mimi (aka my mom) visited a couple of weekends ago. We had a fantastic time, and got to take care of a bunch of pre-baby nesting. Most significantly, we officially moved James down the hall into his big boy room.

We think (hope) that we've solved the slightly unusual childproofing problem that had kept us from setting James up in his own room before. It sounds like most people install gates at the top and bottom of the stairs to keep toddlers from rampaging on the stairs unsupervised. James, however, isn't that physically reckless, and is uncontrollably fascinated with locking mechanisms. We briefly installed a gate at the bottom of the stairs when he first learned to use them. A disaster. James had no interest in doing dangerous tricks on the stairs. Rather, he climbed up onto the first step, hung onto the gate, and spent hours examining the lock. In less than three days, he'd figured out how to unlock the latch. Since he was leaning on the gate when he did so, he went flying, fell off the step, and landed with a thud on the floor.

We did not care to repeat this experience at midnight at the top of the stairs.

What we've done instead -- and we have our fingers crossed that this will work -- is to keep a light on at the bottom of the stairs, so that if James gets up at night he can see where they are. We've also temporarily shoved a large box of diapers across the top of the steps -- it has no interesting features, and James can certainly push it out of the way if he wants to, but the box should (a) buy us a few seconds to wake up and realize what he's doing and (b) be enough of a challenge for him to push aside that he won't go down the stairs unless he means to.

Here are a couple of pictures of James enjoying his new habitat (and Mimi's flip-flops, which I agree are pretty spiffy):

James has taken really well to his big-boy bed, which is a queen-sized bed, fairly low to the ground. (He's never had any patience with cribs, playpens, or any other structure that fences him in.) He will, however, sometimes call out in the night for one of us to visit him. For the first several days, we made a point of going to him quickly when he did so, to keep him from being afraid of sleeping away from us (his previous bed had been a futon mattress in our room). Now that he's used to his room, however, we decided to introduce the concept of self-soothing. Here is how it's been going:

Last night he fussed for a few minutes around 2, then settled back to sleep. At 4, however, we heard a loud, cross shout. James wanted company, and he wanted it right away. Dave went in to him, sat with him for a few minutes, then told him we loved him and were just down the hall.

A few minutes later, the angry shouting recommenced. Dave gave him a minute to see if he'd calm down, then went down the hall, repeated that we loved him and were nearby, then came back. Another round of this ensued, with more angry shouting.

All of a sudden the angry shouting stopped. We wondered what had happened.

We did not have long to wait.

Seconds later, the angry shouting started again. It came closer. We heard thumping little footsteps, and James burst into the room. He had climbed out of bed, snatched his blanket and binky, and stormed down the hall to give us a piece of his mind. He parked himself by Dave's side of the bed and shouted at him. There were clearly words in his shouting, but between the binky and the rage I couldn't make them out. The meaning was pretty clear, though.