Climbing out of the crib is mildly dangerous, since it's farther down on the outside than the inside. So it's good practice to switch a way from a crib (or adjust the crib to be taller) once they get to where they'll be able to do that soon.
Even if they can do it safely, though, a crib they can get in and out of on their own defeats the purpose of a crib -- at that point you should just move to something optimized for being easy to get in and out of, like a bed.
at that point you should just move to something optimized for being easy to get in and out of, like a bed
yes, yes. Exactly. Isn't it much more practical to put her in a bet/mattress on the floor? That's what we do. Just using the mattress from the crib, for example.
The reason I want to stick with a crib over a bed or floor mattress (and I assume the reason most people use cribs) is that it keeps them in their bed during the time they're supposed to be sleeping.
ok. We take our son anyway out of the bet as soon as he wakes up. He sleeps long enough already by himself.
In our case I'm not worried about when they wake up in the morning, but about going to sleep, especially at naptime. A crib is boring and conducive to sleep, but there are a lot of interesting things to play with around the room.
A few days ago I came upstairs to:
Either we needed to be done with the crib, which had a good chance of much less sleeping at naptime, or we needed a taller crib. This is also something we went through when Lily was little, and that time what worked was removing the bottom of the crib.
It's a basic crib, a lot like this one. The mattress sits on a metal frame, which attaches to a set of holes along the side of the crib. On it's lowest setting, the mattress is still ~6" above the floor. Which means if we remove the frame and sit the mattress on the floor, we gain ~6".
Without the mattress weighing it down, though, the crib would not be hard for an energetic toddler to tip. I've attached it to the wall on two sides with strapping, right into a stud:
Nora was eager to give it a try, holding on the rail and bouncing hard:
This should get us a bit more time with solid naps!
(I was going to do something similar with Anna when she was the same age, but the crib we happened to be using for her was designed differently and had a structurally important bar across the bottom.)
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