Bunk beds for everyone!

This news is about a month old, but it still feels pretty current to most of us: the girls are officially sleeping in bunk beds.

We’ve been thinking about bunk beds for a while, but we were waiting until the girls were old enough to handle this kind of adventure nightly. On our “vacation in Michigan”:/news/2011/vacation-simplicity-on-the-lake/ at the end of May, Lucy and Rosie had the perfect opportunity to try sleeping in bunk beds on a trial basis. And they loved it! Rosie fell out of the bottom bunk a couple of times, but we pulled another mattress to the floor to catch her so it was no problem.

When we returned from Michigan on the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, Jon unloaded the car as fast as he could, hopped back in, and headed straight out to IKEA to purchase bunk beds of our own. We got a “nice, simple, wooden model”:http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20102451 with extra rails along the top bunk (which makes us all feel safer about Lucy sleeping way up there). That Saturday was devoted to disassembling old beds, building the new, and buying some festive sheets. We had to do some major furniture re-arranging in the process (including moving our awesome Elfa hanging bookshelves to another wall), but it was all done by suppertime.

If you ask the girls about their bunk beds, they will certainly tell you about their canopies. Lucy has a “giant leaf canopy”:http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60054636 hanging over the top of her bed, so she can feel like she is sleeping in the jungle. And although Rosie’s bottom bunk doesn’t have a leaf, she does like to say that Lucy’s bed serves as her canopy. Very organic.

The transition has probably been the most challenging for Rosie. She misses her toddler bed sometimes, where she liked to wedge her head into the corner while sleeping. We put a couple of pool noodles under the sheets to mimic a raised edge, and this has helped a bit with her sense of comfort. The greater benefit, though, of the pool noodles is the elimination of Rosie’s falling-out-of-bed syndrome. Rosie has also had a bit more trouble falling asleep at night lately — between the late sunshine, exciting summer activities, and new beds, she’s often pretty wired when 7:30 rolls around, but that seems to be improving, too. (Or maybe not. It’s day-to-day.) The main thing Rosie will tell you if you ask her about her new bed is that she sleeps on the bottom now, but she has big plans to sleep on the top bunk when she turns five years old (the minimum top-bunk-sleeping age in the Boyd house).

I didn’t have a chance to sleep in bunk beds until I was in college, so I think it is pretty cool that the girls get to have this set-up in their preschool years. Our only challenge now is reminding them that the beds are for sleeping and are not merely an indoor extension of the “jungle gym”:/news/2010/jungle-gym/!