Us: Chad, this is your new bed.
Chad: Cool. Good-night.
Us: Sweet dreams, dude.
The End
This is how the twins' transition has been going:
We wanted to get them out of their cribs and used to beds before vacation this summer. Plus, we had to move Chad to a bigger bed and had to put his toddler bed somewhere, so why not pass it on? When one of the twins' club moms posted that she wanted to sell her toddler bed, I took it as a sign we were ready to move everyone up. They nap on cots at school, so how hard could this be?
Answer: Ha. There are two of them. It will be impossible.
Things started off cute enough:
(And Chad's new bed is a nice too!)
But while Chad never got out of his bed as a toddler, it didn't take long for Theo and Natalie to realize they had free reign over the room.
(Sorry, for the blur, it's hard to take a pano with your phone.)
It got to be that every nap and every bedtime was a struggle and a mess:
All tuckered out from their shenanigans. Emptying every drawer is hard work!
We bought drawer locks for the dresser and door locks for the closet and moved the glider, which they had pushed over a few times, out of the room. One nap was suspiciously quiet, and I could see shadows from the blinds moving under their door. I went in to find them both sitting on top of the dresser, swinging the blinds. No idea how they got up there. But obviously the dresser had to move too. One by one, the pictures were removed from the wall as they figured out how to knock them down.
All of this helped the weekend nap situation a little bit, and we've tried to alternate rocking with one of them to make sure that at least one is asleep when we close the door. That isn't always enough, because we've found Natalie jumping on Theo's bed shouting at him to get up while he slept.
At first, being in a completely empty room was enough to eventually bore them into sleeping. Until... they learned that it was funny to take their clothes and diapers off. Which means we have to check on them every few minutes because otherwise we'll eventually get to the point of someone shrieking, "My bed! My bed is wet!" And now bedtimes are back to two hour ordeals again.
This week I had a big presentation on Tuesday, and woke up Monday morning feeling like my head was a snot filled water balloon ready to pop. Andy and Chad had Bulls game plans for that night, so all day long I was counting down the minutes until I could put the twins in bed, take a couple dozen Nyquil, and be asleep and on the road to recovery by 7:30. Of course, they had other plans. Like, it was 9:45 and I was changing Theo's sheets. Needless to say, I did not manage to miraculously cure myself in time for my talk on Tuesday. (I had to take three days off of running, which I think is the most I've skipped in about a year.)
They repeated their antics Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Thursday morning we woke up to screeching at 5AM because Theo was upset that he was naked and cold. Well, whose fault is that, Theo? You were clothed the last time I checked on you. I dropped them off at daycare and told their teacher that I was going to lose my damn mind if I didn't get some actual sleep soon, instead of doing diaper checks every ten minutes. Without missing a beat she said, "Just put their zippered jammies on them backwards so they can't get out." And I can't find a gif to express that moment, but it was like angels singing and fairies dancing and rainbow sparkles falling on us and I said, "Miss LaDonna, I love you, thank you, you saved my sanity!" and legit ran down the hall to KPA where Andy was getting Chad settled to tell him of the new master plan and we were so excited to try backwards jammies that night. All day long as I poured myself one cup of coffee after another in an attempt to make people think I had slept the night before, I was thinking, "Tomorrow I'll be well-rested because they're wearing their jammies backwards tonight! Yippy!"
During dinner, we told them it was "special back-zip jammies" night, and got them all secured and said, "Muah-ha-ha-ha, go the F to sleep!" and shut the door knowing that whatever trouble they got into we could kind of not worry about because there was nothing left in the room to throw around, and their diapers would remain under their un-removable "special back-zip jammies".
Ha.
Back-zip jammies would probably work with one child. Either mine are especially limber, or they worked their twin collusion to unzip each other. I went in to find naked toddlers. And as a a special. "Screw you guys for making it harder for us to get undressed," Theo had launched his diaper into the air and I found it here:
Curses. Foiled again.
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