Big Boy Beds

"I don't want a new bed," Christopher Robin insisted on our way home from the furniture store a month ago, van loaded with large boxes of new bunk bed pieces.

"Don't worry," I assured him. "It's not time to change beds yet." The unfinished wood would have to be assembled first, and then coated with three coats of polyurethane, and that would take us a little while.

After "helping" us put the beds together, and several mornings spent playing in the basement with Peanut Butter while My Hero and I sanded and wiped and polyed, Christopher Robin found the idea of sleeping in a bed up high, accessed only by ladder, exciting. He impatiently asked when it would be ready.

Still, last night as he and Daddy ceremoniously carried his toddler bed out of the bedroom, after his new bed was carried upstairs and assembled in its place, he again told My Hero, "I don't want a new bed." Even though he did. He wasn't ready to be rid of his old bed. It is a darling little bed, and he probably would have stayed in it at least a few more years if we had the space for two beds and a crib in the kids' room. Or at least would have passed it on to Peanut Butter when he moved to a twin bed, to free up the crib for their little sister. But we decided we weren't ready to move any of the kids to a bedroom in the basement yet, so they'll share a room for a year or two, the three of them, and putting the boys in bunk beds was the only way that could happen in their little room.

Once the old bed was removed and the boys had a few minutes to climb the ladder and play on the bed "up top," it was clear the excitement and novelty would make the transition and relatively painless one.

Relatively painless. The biggest adjustment is actually for Peanut Butter, who has been used rolling around to sleep against any of the four walls of the crib. Suddenly his rolling around tumbles him off the side of the bed. Cushions on the floor don't eliminate the rudeness of awakening to falling on the floor in the middle of a sleepy dream. Twice last night I heard the thump, and twice I tucked him, whimpering, safely into his bed, close to the wall, far from the edge. Our bodies learn, after a while, to stay away from the edge, but until then I expect a few more tumbles.