On the topic of Joseph milestones, we noticed that he was starting to get ideas about climbing out of his crib last weekend. Nothing too overt, mind you: just leaning over the side and lifting his feet off the ground. However, we’ve been hoping to avoid a repeat of the Julia scenario, in which we found her wandering the halls (OK, hall) of the house after we thought she was safely tucked away in bed.

So, we converted his crib into a toddler bed, of sorts. It’s not technically a convertible crib, so we just removed the drop side, leaving the bed open to the rest of the room. The mattress sits a bit higher than you’d expect for a toddler bed—it’s a good eight inches higher than Julia’s for example—probably due to a) the drawers underneath the bed and b) the fact that it’s not actually intended to be used in this way. The height made me a little nervous, but at this point my head was filled with mental images of Joseph toppling headfirst over the side rail, so it seemed like an acceptable risk. Just to make me feel better, we put a couple soft pillows at the base of the crib.

Naturally, Joe fell out of bed that first night. I was working in the office when I heard two loud thumps. At first, I assumed it was Maggie chasing imagined enemies around the living room, but she was sleeping soundly on the guest bed. Next, I wondered if perhaps someone was trying to get into the house; our neighborhood is nice, but it’s not so nice that a break-in would be unthinkable, and a violent home invasion is one of my pet phobias. Only after I’d discounted that possibility—and not until after I’d quietly scouted the doors of the house to make sure they were locked—did it dawn on me what had happened, and even then, I was surprised that Joseph hadn’t so much as cried out when it happened.

I opened the door to the kids’ room and sure enough, there was Joseph, half-asleep and scrabbling around on the floor, trying to get comfortable on one of the pillows. I picked him up and sat with him for a few minutes, trying to ascertain whether he’d broken anything (unlikely, given that he seemed utterly unconcerned with anything other than getting back to sleep) or had managed to give himself a concussion (he seemed like his normal Joe self, which, in hindsight, is hardly conclusive evidence one way or the other). Finally satisfied that he hadn’t suffered any permanent damage, I put him back in bed—the far edge, against the remaining side—and put a few strategically placed stuffed animals between him and the edge in the vain hope that they’d provide a psychological barrier to prevent him from rolling too far in that direction. Then I left.

I lasted all of about ten minutes before deciding that this was a wholly inadequate solution. Thus inspired, I maneuvered the mattress off the guest bed in the office and dragged it across the hall to the kids’ room.

Now, although the guest bed’s mattress is just a single, it’s not a thin, flexible foam-rubber cushion like the ones you see in college dorms. Julie bought this for use with a trundle bed that was supposed to sit underneath our old guest bed, which now rests, disassembled, in the garage. It’s a good twelve inches thick and weighs a ton; it’s so big that the trundle/mattress combination never fit correctly under the old bed, so we couldn’t actually pull it out when the need arose.
Somehow, I managed to haul this behemoth through the door and into the room, position it next to Joe’s bed, and stuff the gap between the mattress and the underside of the bed with blankets without either child so much as stirring. Sometimes, you get lucky.

Satisfied with my ingenuity and comforted by the knowledge that Joseph was safe and secure, I headed off to sleep. I was really quite proud of myself. Naturally, Julie was somewhat less impressed by my creativity when she woke up the next morning, and the mattress was quickly returned to its home in the office. A cushion from one of the living room sofas replaced it, and though it doesn’t offer the same degree of protection as the foot-thick mattress, it does have the advantage of not taking up the whole room.

Joseph used the potty for the first time this evening. He’s been curious about the whole process for the last couple weeks, so we got the trainer potty down from the attic over the weekend. Generally speaking, he sits on it for a few seconds and then loses interest, but this time, something actually happened. I’m not sure who was more surprised, Joseph or Mommy.

It may have been just a fluke—he’s quite a bit younger than Julia was when she started potty training—but I figure it’s worth getting this up on the Internet now so that he can find it online when he’s doing vanity searches on his name a few years hence.