Storage Space!

Joey is napping right now, and not ON me for once (though he is on Daddy lol) so I get to have a few minutes to myself before he wakes up. Normally, I wouldn't let him nap this close to 1900, but he hasn't really napped all day and I don't think it will interfere too much with bed time later.

I'm pretty stoked about what we got done today, well, what Dan got done while I watched Joey. We're in the process of figuring out a more permanent solution for Joey's crib. Currently, the pack-n-play is still outside our bedroom door. He has outgrown the newborn/bassinet feature and has been on the lower level of the PNP for a couple of months now. I recently purchased a mattress because the one that came with the PNP was just foam on top of cardboard and was bowing in the middle (something I read about in the reviews before I bought it, so not totally unexpected). The mattress is too small so I rolled up baby towels and stuffed them into the open space so that Joey can't roll over and get stuck. I have several of issues with our current arrangement:

1. With him being so low to the floor, he's often exposed to the colder air in the house. I have a wearable blanket that we use with him, but most of the time he doesn't fall asleep wearing it, which means that it doesn't get put on him until halfway through the night or later.
2. The very motion of laying him down that low wakes him up more often than not. Most of the time, when it does wake him up, it wakes him up more fully than he had been when I got up to feed him. This leads to him wanting to play at 0230, not cool.
3. On nights that Dan has a hard time sleeping and stays up to play Xbox, Joey and I will frequently fall asleep together in the big bed. While I tend to sleep lighter and can't move around as freely, I feel like I get more sleep when this happens because of how much more convenient it is to nurse Joey when he's lying right next to me. I like having him at arm's reach, I always have, I didn't want to move him out of our room but due to budget and space restrictions, it was our only choice at the time.

 We ordered oil for the winter. We didn't order as much as we planned so there's a little bit of money left over. I talked to Dan about using it to get us back to co-sleeping and he was totally fine with it. Initially, I looked into the Arm's Reach Co-Sleeper, but that seems to be a glorified bassinet and Joey would grow out of that quickly and we'd be back at square one. Determined to make co-sleeping work for us, I widened my search and came across a blog where the family had turned their crib into a sidecar for their bed. Bingo! This was exactly what I was looking for, a way to co-sleep but still be able to give Joey (and us) his own space. The only question that remained was: how? I came up with two options and presented them to Dan (who is still thinking them over). Both require measuring and other logistics before we can put them into action. One is that we sidecar the crib in our room as we have it now, but moving furniture around so everything fits. I'm feeling meh about this one. The idea that I really like is that we take everything out of Joey's room, move our bed and the crib in and sleep there while our current bedroom becomes like a big walk-in closet where we get dressed and we keep all of Joey's clothes and toys. Eventually we can put a toddler bed in there and keep our bed in the backroom. Again, both ideas require measuring to see if they're even feasible, so we'll work on that.

In the meantime, there was no question that whichever solution we go with, Joey's room would need to be cleared out. We've pretty much used it like a storage closet since we moved in because we ran out of room in the shed and laundry room. The next step in storage was to start using the attic. Today Dan went to Home Depot to pick up plywood and a ladder so we can start storing things in the attic. There's going to be plenty of room up there which is fantastic because most of our stuff is still in boxes from the move. A lot of the stuff was in the closets at our apartment and since we only have two very small closets in the whole house, we've been pretty limited on long-term storage. Joey got cranky towards the end of hauling the wood up to the attic, so we haven't put anything up there yet, but we will. I also may have scored a usable crib off freecycle, so once I coordinate with the woman who's giving it up, I'll be able to see it and assess whether or not we can use it the way I want (and also how big it is for the measuring). We never did get around to getting "real" crib, that would be the financial limitations I mentioned earlier, the bassinet was $46 and the PNP was around $70 and purchased completely with a gift card.

So to sum up:

• Today was step one in cleaning out Joey's room
• The attic is ready for storage
• Possible crib is hopefully coming sometime this week
• I never saw myself being baby-wearing, co-sleeping, cloth-diapering, nursing-pad-making momma. The granola just sort of happened. I'm parenting according to my instincts and if that puts me in some sort of hippie category then so be it. I'm learning to be more unapologetic about who I am.