I've officially gotten my butt-kicking regarding Sammy's over-the-top cosleeping habits. If you were to ask Sammy where he used to sleep, he would, of course, say that he slept in his own bed. But what he would be leaving out is that he considered it his bed only after seizing it from Mommy and Daddy. But after some pressure from an elder at our church as well as Daddy finally having enough, Mommy was forced to get her butt in gear and her baby out of their bed.
Sammy's room has, until now, never properly been Sammy's room. First it was a guest room for helpers when Sammy was a newborn (since we only had a bedside bassinet at that point), then we got a crib, but shoved it our bedroom in order to keep the "guest room" intact. But then we finally got rid of that queen bed with big plans to make that room Sammy's officially, but when push came to shove, Mommy got cold feet. I had my excuses: Sammy was sick and not ready to be on his own, I wanted to stabilize the art about his crib so it wouldn't fall on his little head in the night, etc. etc. Until the room was fairly nonfunctional as anything other than storage.
But when Sean told me that "tonight's the night," I got my act together and finally, after 14 months in this house, made Sammy his very own functional space that's all his own. I don't have any before pictures for you, since I'm pretty embarrassed about it's former stages, but this is how it looks now:
His crib is pulled about a foot away from the window, and those curtains block adequate amounts of light in the morning so that he'll sleep in until 7:30am or later. I never stabilized that art on the shelf, so I just decided to move the changing table under it, which is where the crib used to be. And that rocker has always been there, but the arrangement of the room before made it so out of the way that it never go used. Now we sit and read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Freight Train and Chugga Chugga Choo Choo to him at night as he's winding down. I also moved one of Sammy's two giant toy baskets in this room in an effort to declutter the living room, but it's served itself well in this room as a fun way for Sammy to let off some steam in the late hours of the evening. He used to cry whenever he went in this room because it was never fun and only used for "abandonment," but now he really loves it. And we cherish the time we spend in there together with Sammy at night. And Sammy will even take his three hour naps in here now. I've been able to get so much done in just the naps Sammy's had this past week, since I used to always lay down with him since I was so tired in my first trimester.
Here's the living room's "Sammy corner" with one less large basket full of toys (it's hard to imagine that there were two HUGE baskets next to each other before):
