By now you are perhaps wondering what did prompt me to move Clara into her unfinished room. I mean really, I’d held out for nine months and have written two long posts about how I thought it was a bad idea, why did I cave? I’ll tell you why, because she’s a sleep crawler, that’s why. Here is the whole story:

Clara started out sleeping in bed with us, then as she became mobile she took naps and started the night out sleeping in her own crib in our room. Inevitably she ended up in bed with us by morning. This is because I nursed her, and there is no point in staying awake when you could be sleeping, and so therefore she ate, I slept and she was still there in the morning.

This worked great for many months until Clara started doing this crazy thing where she crawls around in bed with her eyes closed then flops down when her head hits something and lays where she falls sleeping. Sleep crawling? I don’t know, but whatever it is it is not conducive to co-sleeping.  She would finish nursing then lurch around the bed between John and I like a really drunken sailor.  I would start awake when she would move, watch her flop down against John, immediately fall back asleep only to be woken up to her lurching back toward me and flopping on top of me instead.  For awhile I tried to just get up and put her back in her crib. This was difficult for two reasons. The first, I had to get up. The other was that once Clara was back in her crib  she did her crazy sleep crawling in there instead.  John and I are much softer to land on than crib rails so she would bang her head on the side which would wake her all the way up, then see us and want to come back in bed.   Back in bed it never improved. Once I woke up as she crashed into my knees, multiple times I grabbed her as she was headed for the edge. Our happy co-sleeping set up was suddenly missing the the oh so important sleeping portion of co-sleeping. Clara had to go. The girl needed bars, she needed walls, she needed her own room. So last Monday after an especially bad night because of the nighttime crawler I moved her into her own room lack of baseboards and all.

After a few nights of squawking  Clara settled in and sleep has more or less  returned for everyone. Some nights I still wake up and her her rustling around and then a distinct thump as she hits the side of her crib but she almost always goes right back to sleep.

In addition to all the of advantages that come from having a baby free bedroom we have also gained the peephole advantage. At some point someone replaced the door knob on Clara’s door with one that wasn’t the same and left a hole in the door. I purposely set the crib up opposite and now I have a perfect little spy hole to watch and see what she is doing when she is supposed to be sleeping. I can watch this: Turn into this, and so I’m conceding that moving her into her almost finished room was the right thing to do. I just hope the sleep crawler does not turn into a sleep walker or nights or going to get really interesting when she graduates to a bed!

I know in the picture above it looks like there are baseboards on the wall, but it’s just propped up behind the furniture!