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Transitioning from a crib to a bed is a BIG DEAL. The crib has four sides. It has clear boundaries! It's where you child has slept their entire life and feels comfortable, safe and content. I am a big believer in NOT rushing the crib to bed transition. If it ain't broke don't fix it. I'd keep my children in the crib for as long as possible! We always do the transition because we have another baby on the way and will need the crib. In that scenario I recommend doing the transition during 2nd trimester of pregnancy. You don't want to throw too many changes onto your toddler at the same time and doing the switch mid-pregnancy gives the toddler plenty of time to fully adjust before their little baby brother or sister arrives. I have transitioned all three of my kids from the crib to the bed with minimal issues (We just recently moved our current toddler so I don't have a post on that yet but you can read about my oldest child's transition here and my middle...
I am not hardcore about a timeline of when to transition a toddler from a crib to a bed. For us, it's always been about me being pregnant and wanting that toddler to adjust to life in the bed well before the new baby arrives and takes over the toddler's crib ;) With Tess though, I'm not pregnant. However, we are adopting and a baby WILL be joining our family. Even though we have zero clue when that will be! We have been on break with our adoption and will be starting to work with agencies and hopefully being matched with a birth mom soon so we wanted to go ahead and get the nursery rolling and get Tess adjusted to the big kid bed. She's never had a single issue with the crib. None of our kids have ever tried to climb out of it or have seemed like they "needed" the big bed. We have just always made the transition due to timing with our growing family. Our last baby will probably stay in a crib till he's 10 ;) You can see how the transition from crib t...
I know many, many people who transition their children from the crib to a bed at much younger ages than when we made the switch for Britt. For Kye, we transitioned him closer to his second birthday. You can read my post about that experience here! The year from age 2-3 is a BIG year filled with many changes for a toddler. Both of my kids were day trained with the potty prior to turning two so that wasn't something we really had to deal with at the age of 2. With both kids I started working on getting rid of the paci/finger sucking right at two years old. The next big switch for them both was the move from the crib to the "big kid" bed. We waited longer to make this switch with Britt for one reason: crib storage. Kye was still using the room that would become the nursery so we couldn't put the crib in there yet and didn't want to have to drag the crib somewhere to store it only to be moving it back into the nursery! Silly to do all that extra work! So on...
I've been totally promising ya'll this post for awhile now, and it's finally here! As all of you know, I'm a big Babywise Mom. I fully believe in every aspect of each of the books and follow their guidelines the best I can. Because of this, Kye has always been considered by others to be an excellent sleeper (to me, I think he struggles with naps but he still naps much better than typical non-babywise babies so I can't complain!). In true Babywise form, I believe in doing one major change at a time. The year from 2 - 3 is filled with many changes for a kid (potty training for most, getting rid of the pacifier, transitioning to big bed, meeting a new sibling...). Since Kye was day potty trained before he turned two, we decided the second big thing to mark off the list was the pacifier . I started that weaning process right after he turned two (on March 4th). Once we were done with that, we were ready for the big boy bed! I hosted Ashley's Baby Shower o...
