Transition two toddlers to beds: room prep
Our 1.5 and 2.5 year olds share a small bedroom and both are starting to swing their legs over the edge of their cribs and attempt a balancing act on the rails. Their cribs transition to toddler beds with safety rails, so I'm not concerned about that. What I dread is their ability to freely move about the room and house.
Considerations: I'm sure I'm going to have to take the dresser out of their room, or at least put magnet locks on the drawers so they can't open and close the drawers/fling the contents about. We have a plug in kid alarm clock, monitor, and a "child safe" heater fan because the heat from the rest of the house doesn't get into the bedrooms well. I can secure the clock and monitor cords to the wall and install a single shelf for them out of reach, but what to do about the heater?
1. What did you do to secure/prep your child's room for post-crib adventures (especially if you had/have a shared room with toddlers)?
2. Any suggestions for securing closets?
3. What to do about the heating fan?
4. How did you (or did you) secure the door? Or use a baby gate?
5. They can reach the black out curtain when it's pulled down, so we'll have to use something else, at least for the bottom third of the window. Ideas?
Thank you for sharing your experiences!
Parent Replies
For the windows - we’ve had luck with black foam core, which you can custom cut to the size of the window frame. Pop them in at night and easy to store behind dresser or crib during the day.
i personally haven’t felt comfortable locking the door of the room but instead put a baby gate at the top of the stairs to prevent our kid from taking a fall.
With all our childproofing, we’ve taken a reactive approach—in other words, watch closely for the first few days and wait to see what kind of trouble your kid gets into, and then solve for that. I know it’s nice to feel prepared but you may be surprised by how your kids respond. We were sure our daughter would wreak havoc in the mornings when we transitioned to a big kid bed at 2.75 years old. Instead she beelines to our room to cuddle with us every morning. When we moved her to a different floor of the house at 3.5 we were prepared for havoc again but she still climbs up to our bed every morning. Might be worth the wait & see approach to save yourselves time and money. Amazon has a million childproofing gizmos that can be delivered next day once you pinpoint your needs!
We put a lock in the closet, made sure the heater was off overnight, took everything out of the room that we couldn’t be 100% sure was safe and put a baby gate on the doorway. We had a baby camera too.
Before moving to beds, you could try a crib tent. This kept my son in his crib for an extra year after he climbed out a couple times.