Crib Jumper

Hey there peeps! Ben and I just returned from a wonderful 4 day trip to MTZ/Peoria to visit my family. My brother is on a 2 week leave from Afghanistan and it was beyond great to see him! Now he just has 6 more months to go and he is back for good!!! Praise God!! And my parents had just returned from a 10 day trip to Israel. I loved hearing about the amazing places they saw. The pictures they took were incredible! My mom re-affirmed her baptism in the Jordan River. Wow!!

Ok, so I'm sure you're wondering about the title of this post. Here goes...My parents have a crib at their house that we use for Ben when we visit. This time around, however, Ben went into an absolute panic when I tried to lay him down in it. He simply would NOT calm down. So, I let him sleep in the "big" bed with me. The first night we did this it worked fine, but the next night, he just wouldn't sleep. After about an hour and a half of him climbing all over me and talking, I'd had enough (it was about 10:30pm at this point) and put him back in the crib and left the room. As expected, he went into a huge fit. But after about 10 minutes of him crying, it got very quiet. I figured he just cried himself to sleep. Then, about 5 minutes later, I heard something banging on the bedroom door and then more crying. I went to open the door and there he was....standing at the door. He had managed to get out of the crib.

When we returned home from our trip, I was nervous that he would now start climbing out of his own crib (which is in our bedroom). However, I held on to the hope that he feels comfortable and safe in his own crib and all would be fine. When I laid him down in his crib for the night, he freaked out just like he did at my parents house. I should mention that once Ben gets a taste of sleeping in a "big" bed with us, it is very difficult to break him of it. We've been through this many, many times. Even if we let him in bed with us for just ONE night, it will take darn near a week to get him to sleep back in his own bed without him waking up multiple times a night and screaming at the top of his lungs for upwards of an hour at a time. Anyway, we let him cry it out for awhile and he finally went to sleep. When I went to bed that night, I went to tuck him in like I always do....but he wasn't in his crib!!! I immediately panicked and thought he may have fallen out of the crib and hurt himself, so I turned on the lights and there he was.....under the covers, sound asleep....IN OUR BED.

When Greg came in to observe my discovery, we started laughing hysterically. So now the time has finally come....we have to move Ben to his own room with a big boy bed. This is very bittersweet. It will be nice to have our room to ourselves again, but it was a joy to wake up to his little, smiling face right next to our bed every morning. The time has come though. We'll be converting his crib to a toddler bed this weekend and we'll move him up to his room. It's going to be rough around the Reynolds homestead for awhile folks....ROUGH!!! Here are some pics of our little crib jumper......

Sometimes the cuteness is just too much for me to handle. Don't you just want kiss that sweet little face?

In other news, my 10 mile race is supposed to be this weekend. And just like every other year, the weather is not looking good. And by "not looking good", I mean it will be below freezing with a rain/snow mix. With each passing day, the forecast is getting worse and worse. It is also supposed to rain tonight AND tomorrow which means the trail we are running on is going to be a muddy mess. Really, mother nature??? REALLY?? It was 81 degrees here two days ago. Seriously. The winter to spring transition in the midwest is just RUDE. I don't even know if I'm really going to run it. I'll feel like a wimp if I drop out but I don't care. I'm going to see if I can just drop down to the 5k. Then I'll only feel like a partial wimp. Lincoln has a very large running community and they are hard core. They don't drop out of races for weather...they just don't. I guess we'll see if I can suck it up and get the job done. Wish me luck :-)

Brooke