How To Sidecar a Crib

Co-sleeping is awesome. It's not the right choice for every family or every situation, but we were fortunate enough to try it, enjoy it, and make it work for us. After Joey got too big for his bassinet in early August, and we moved him to the pack 'n play, I thought I'd overcome how much I missed having him next to me at night. I figured that eventually we'd move him to his own room and I'd be ok with it. Not only did the feelings not go away, they got stronger and I began to really, really miss co-sleeping. Especially when the teething started and he woke up more often to comfort nurse. So I began researching options for co-sleeping that would work with a larger baby and in the confined space that is our house. I came across How we sidecarred our crib and knew that I wanted to try it with Joey! Now, without further ado, here is how we sidecarred our crib and are again co-sleeping full time after 4 long months!

We got a crib off of Freecycle.org from another family no longer using theirs. It is a drop-side crib, but because we left off the side that comes down, the danger is no longer there. Our bed is also super-tall, so I purchased bed risers to add height to the crib. If I had only added height under the mattress, eventually, when Joey is pulling himself to standing, he would be able to fall over the side. This way, the sides get height added to them as well. It's important to place the crib in the corner of the room for added security so it can't separate from the adult bed.

Not pictured: we used ratchet straps also to secure the crib to the adult bed frame. There are two straps that run from the crib, between the mattress and box spring of our bed, to hook onto the frame on the other side.

We're pretty sure we were missing pieces of the crib because upon initial assembly, we couldn't figure out how to attach the spring part for the mattress. So Dan finagled something with thick pieces of wood, and I actually like it a lot more than just the flimsy-looking pieces of metal.

Proof of Dan's hard work! He sat there and bounced without any problems!

As suggested, we used high-density foam to fill gaps. We only needed one 2in thick, 8ft. piece to fill all our gaps, score!

Crib mattress is flush with the adult mattress, foam is wrapped in a twin-size flat sheet, and mommy and baby are happy to be co-sleeping again!

Our bedroom is not gigantic. At all. I forget the exact dimensions but it's in the 11'x9' range (that could be the smaller bedroom but ours isn't bigger by very much) and we were able to make this work for us. Granted, we had to rotate the bed but that was the only major change to our room besides the addition of the crib. We did this last night and had a chance to try the set up. Other than night nursing is so much easier when I don't have to get out of bed, I don't have much to say yet. Last night was one of Joey's up-every-hour nights AND I had to be up early for work, so not a whole lot of sleep happening anyway. We'll see how it goes the next couple of nights and I'll report back.