It’s week two of Luke sleeping in his new Big Boy Bed. It’s not going as well as we hoped, but I suppose it could be worse. Currently he just doesn’t seem to want to stay in it when we first put him down to sleep. Once he falls asleep he stays asleep and doesn’t get up until morning. It is frustrating and exhausting but I am determined that we will get through this. At first we just tried the Supernanny method of continuing to put him back down – over and over and over again. That doesn’t seem to be working. I don’t have two hours every night to go through that ritual and there has to be a better way.

We have had a bit of success with bribing (I like to call it rewarding). We tell him that if he stays in bed then he will get a treat when he wakes up (the kid loves M&M’s, or as he calls them… num-nums). I’ve also tried to step up his bedtime routine. When he was sleeping in his crib we would clean up toys, brush his teeth, and tell him “good night” and he did fine. But I have to remember that it wasn’t always that way. When he was just a tiny baby I worked very hard to “train” him to go to bed. Now that he is in a different bed I believe we need to retrain him. So the new bedtime routine is a bit longer and more involved. We do all the same things but we’re adding book reading and snuggling and praying and sometimes a little rubbing of the head (he loved that as a baby). I’m hoping all of these things will help him prepare mentally for bedtime and hopefully naptime too. I think a big part of the problem is that when we put him to bed he’s still in “play” mode and that’s making it hard for him to just sit still. The kid loves to sleep so I know we will have success in the end. It’s just going to take some patience and creativity.

Wish us luck and if you have any pointers or empathetic stories to share, please share!