Bed Lift

On Saturday, because it was so tremendously hot out, and because our bedroom is essentially in the attic, and because we only have ONE regular-sized window on the entire second floor of our house, Lena and I decided that it would be a great idea to give our bedroom a bit of a makeover. You know, so that we could be as sweaty and over-heated as possible. The main beneficiary of our sticky efforts was our family bed, which was scheduled for a pre-baby bed-lift.

As Lena gets increasingly pregnant, getting up off of our floor-level bed was becoming increasingly difficult (this is a difficulty that I am rather familiar with myself, since I continued to heave my pregnant-with-nearly-15-pounds-of-baby body up off of the floor several times a night until Luke and Jaz were born). And looking ahead to the birth and the post-partum period, we realized that having the bed up off of the floor might actually be a great idea (in case Lena chooses to labor on/around the bed, and for safety reasons once the baby is here).

We own two bed frames, one is full-sized and has a head board and everything. This is the bed that we bought just before we began TTC the first time. Even though we knew we wanted to cosleep with our future baby, Lena insisted that a full-sized bed was big enough. She worried that a bigger bed would result in less spooning. Ha! By the time I was 3 months pregnant with the twins (a mere four months after we bought our double bed), we were ready for our king-sized mattress since all of my extra pillows required more space. We put the seemingly enormous new mattress directly on the floor since we couldn't afford to buy another bed frame, and the full-size mattress and frame went into the basement (until we lent it to our dear friends, Katie and Aaron, who then went on to conceive their twins in the very same--"cursed," according to Aaron--bed). It wasn't until Luke and Jaz were 18 months old that we sprung for a simple king-sized frame and moved our bed off of the floor (where it remained until Zeben started rolling).

The floor is a great place for a Family Bed, namely because there's no worry about anyone falling off of it. Another benefit is that you can fill your entire room with wall-to-wall bed and eliminate any cracks between the mattresses, as we have done.

What the bed looked like before Saturday

The only down-side to this set-up (aside from being difficult to get out of if your pregnant) is that it's hard to separate off an area for a newborn baby to sleep safely in. Lena and I are not particularly concerned about the safety of co-sleeping (indeed we believe that it is quite safe), but the idea of our 3 rambunctious older children sharing bed space with a vulnerable newborn doesn't sound like the best plan. When Zeben was born, we had our king and full-sized mattresses up on frames right next to each other, and I slept on the smaller bed with the baby while Lena slept on the big bed with Luke and Jaz. And this is the exact same set-up that we're planning to use with baby Leo. Lena and the baby will sleep on the full-sized bed, and I will sleep with Zeben and Jaz (and occassionally Lukas, who mostly sleeps through the night in his own bed these days) on the king-sized bed. We will put up a barrier between the two beds. After a few months, once Leo starts to roll, we'll go back to our old room-full-of-bed set-up and take the barrier down. But for now, this is what our Family Bed looks like (unmade and everything, very true to life):


We're not completely thrilled with it; the crack between the two beds is unfortunate (especially since I end up there frequently), and there's some concern over the location of the window (especially since we might not last the summer without an air conditioner this year). We've decided to give it a week and then re-evalute if we think this is the ideal nest for our new babe. But if we decide to change things up again, we definitely won't pick a 90° day to do it. Ever again.