Growing up, and the big girl bed

I never thought of myself as a sappy person, but these days I can't help but look at Emi and realize that she's not a baby anymore and get all emotional about it. I see her talking more, starting to understand the world around her, and wanting to do things by herself without my help. She sits in booster chairs at restaurants now, rather than a high chair. She knows the dogs are not supposed to be on the couch and tattles on them when they get up there. She know that cars can go "crash" (that's a Scott related story for another time - no worries, not his car), that the stove is hot, and that the juicer is loud. She's in a big girl bed.

Knowing that we'll need the crib for Baby Z2 in a few months, we decided to get Emi a twin bed. We let her pick out her own sheets (she wanted Thomas the Train), and we set it up on Saturday. I was expecting it to be a long and sleepless weekend, good thing it was a holiday!

Saturday night, we put her to bed, and she didn't want to go to sleep. I'm sure it was strange for her. She cried for about 15 minutes, and when she was asleep for about 15 minutes we left the room. At about 11pm, Scott and I were downstairs watching TV. We heard a big thump (Emi falling off the bed), then little feet running, then another louder thump (Emi running out of her room and smack into a wall). When Scott ran up to see her, she was lying in the hallway holding her head and crying "owie, owie". Am I horrible to think this is funny? Emi, when you are old enough to read this, I'm sure you'll be laughing, too.

The following morning, she woke us up at 6am by coming into our room (this is the part I dreaded) and was ready to play and start the day. That day, we went and got a bed rail. The rest of the weekend wasn't bad, but she does seem to have a wacky internal clock that has her coming into our room at 6am on the dot.

On Tuesday night, she fell out of bed, even with the bed rail. The instructions say that you have to leave a 9 inch gap at the top of the bed (where the pillow normally is), but she managed to fall out of that 9 inch gap. I put her huge Pooh stuffed animal there to catch her, and Wed night she was very concerned about Pooh being in just the right place to catch her. I also stuffed a blanked under the sheet in that corner to hopefully prevent any more falls. No falls last night, but she did wake up on and off all night until about 1am and came into our room every time.

Hopefully she'll be in a routine in about a week, and we can all start sleeping through the night again. But for now, I'm glad that she still wants to cuddle and sleep with her mommy and daddy. At least she still needs us...