It appears that my plan worked, mostly. I’m feeling much better today. The cough is gone and I’m hoping that the sore throat is on its way out as well.

Now, on to the first question:

M3 wrote: “If you feel like taking a request, I’d love to hear anything about the girls’ napping/sleeping at night/transition out of cribs/etc. Any sleep tips you can offer would be appreciated — we’re all about the (lack of) sleeping right now.”

The Cupcakes moved into their big girl beds almost exactly one year ago, on November 23rd, 2006. How do I know this? Because DH blogged about it. It’s handy having a family archivist. As I recall, they made the transition from crib to mattress pretty smoothly. We left one of their cribs up for a while in case they wanted to sleep there instead, but they never did. The first couple of months that the mattresses were up in their bedroom we spent a lot more time playing in their room to get them used to the new set-up. I let them jump on their beds (my mother is now rolling over in her grave at the thought of children being allowed to jump on the bed - the horror!). We read stories there and snuggled there. We tried to make the beds as enticing as possible.

They certainly sleep much better on the mattresses than they did in their cribs, but ‘much better’ is a very relative term. When they were in their cribs we averaged 6 - 8 wake-ups per night. When they moved to the mattresses it went down to 3 or 4 wake-ups per night. Now we’re down to 2 or 3, and on a very, very good night none at all.

The biggest problem they had with the cribs was that they are both very restless sleepers; they would scoot all around the crib, bonking their heads, getting their feet and hands tangled in the crib rails and dropping their binkies onto the floor all night long. While they never climbed out of their cribs I was certain that there was no way that they would stay put in separate toddler beds. That meant two mattresses on the floor, pushed together and shoved into a corner. To keep them from rolling over onto each other, and to keep S2 from rolling onto the floor, we put a bed rail under her bed. DH has a picture of the original setup here. (Of course) It didn’t always work; on a couple of occasions H2 managed to climb over the rail and flop onto her sister in her sleep. They’ve also both managed to fall off the end of the bed a few times. But, overall it seems to have done its job.

We’ve since removed the bed rail (it was damaged by one too many bed-jumping gone off course) and replaced it with a big ‘ole pile of blankets, pillows and stuffed animals.

Not exactly something out of Architectural Digest, but it works.

As far as sleep tips are concerned, I don’t know if I know all that much. I know a lot about surviving children who don’t sleep, though… We’ve settled on a fixed bedtime and bedtime routine which seems to help. For a good, long time I referred to myself as the Rigidly Inflexible Routine Parent. A little more than two years down the road I’ve gotten more flexible, I no longer stress out if their routine is disrupted, but we still follow all of the steps in the bedtime ritual (minus the bedtime bottle/sippy cup) that we’ve had for two years. For the most part the Cupcakes go to bed quite willingly at this point (definitely NOT the case for the first year or so), but they still wake up at night.

Nap times are another story. They both nap well at preschool - hooray for peer pressure! But they frequently fight the nap at home. When they, or we, really, really need them to take a nap we have resorted to strapping them into their carseats and taking them on a Ride to Sleepytown. Going in and laying down with them until they fall asleep can work, too. But nothing works as well as it used to. I’m afraid that the glorious days of the afternoon nap will soon be coming to an end. …sigh…

I don’t know if that was helpful, or interesting, or if most of you all gave up three paragraphs ago. For those of you who hung on ’til the end - thanks!