Hellobee Boards

I will post when i can type on an actual computer later today. I have written a lot in my nursery blog posts though in the meantime in case you want to check those out

We did this but later on (not in infancy). We put foam mats under the mattress. For clothes we are using an office style cabinet, so it only has two low shelves and a few drawers. Minimal toys and mostly books are in a couple boxes on the floor. It has worked really well for us. At almost 3 we just got a bed base for the mattress per his request.

Ok...sorry, busy weekend!

So, the floor bed totally didn't work for us. At all. I think we had a perfect storm of reasons why not though, and I would definitely try again with future kiddos.

1. LO was mobile before he was sleeping through the night. So, he would wake up at 4:30 am and think it was play time. He had just enough sleep to not be tired enough to go back to bed...but not enough to function during the day.

2. LO cared more about BEING mobile than just about anything else. From the time he wakes up until the time he falls asleep, he is moving (and has been since he learned to crawl). He doesn't care about toys, so removing them from the room didn't make it "boring" for him...all he cared about was wandering, which he could do in an empty room.

3. LO fights sleep something fierce when he gets overtired. It has become my primary mission as his mom to make sure he never gets overtired because it means 3-4 days of hell trying to get him caught up. So, having him just "fall asleep when he is ready" does not work for him. He will fight and fight to stay awake (running, usually) until he is so overtired that he CANT sleep. Disaster.

We are looking at trying the floor bed again when he is about 18 months, after we drop the morning nap. We got it down about a week ago, and he was SO EXCITED about it that naps were never going to happen. Sigh.

As far as other Montessori stuff, I really wish I had known about the mobiles and other infant Montessori stuff when he was teeny. I plan to make those for our next one in the future.

The picture hanging strips are these http://www.command.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NACommand/Command/Products/Catalog/?N=5924736+3294871212+3294529207&rt=rud . They were great! LO loved pulling up on the pictures to check them out (and eventually loved pulling them off the wall!). We had to take them back down when we put the crib back in his room (had to do some rearranging of furniture and we no longer have the wall space to have them down low) but I really loved having them at his eye level.

@pui: sounds like you have a perfect setup!

@Mrs. Lion: that's good to know. Thanks!

@pui: One more thing I didn't add. If you aren't getting an actual crib and don't end up getting an ikea mattress, I would go ahead and get a very thin twin mattress. We got one at a local mattress store...I think we ended up paying $40. It isn't much, but it is more than enough support for him. He outgrew the crib mattress pretty quickly and they tend to be a lot thicker, meaning a further distance to the floor. Even though it never hurt him, it made an awful thud when he rolled off, and I felt much more comfortable with him rolling off the twin than the crib mattress. Eventually he will be in a queen bed (probably when he is 3 or 4) so we are just going to use the twin in the mean time, so we didn't care about it being super high quality. The one we got is perfect

@pui: I stopped feeling comfortable with the crib sized mattress when he started rolling over a lot (which is different for each baby). The mattress was only too small because he would roll off. It wasn't harmful to him, but I would still rush back there to check every time. Once we switched him to the twin sized he never rolled off again.