dare I say it...

I've wanted to post about this all week, but I've been afraid that this act would somehow hex the good mojo that we have going on right now. But the time has come and this Mama is bragging...

Baby has slept in her BIG GIRL BED for five consecutive nights! She basically has been sleeping in her Pack-and-Play since mid-January, after she shimmied out of her crib. If you remember, that day The Hater put up the big girl bed. Shortly after that we put up the PNP in her room, too, because she wanted nothing to do with it. (That was a suggestion from a brilliant friend and busy Mom of three boys.)

Sometimes on the weekends she would nap in the big girl bed, but usually she'd be against it and avoid it. I let her. Sleeping in the PNP can't be comfortable - she's longer than it is, but she was sleeping through the night and I wasn't going to mess with that. We figured that eventually she'd be okay with the big girl bed.

This past weekend she napped in it for me on Saturday. Then Saturday night when we were getting ready for bed I asked her if she wanted to sleep in her big girl bed and she said no. I said, hey, what if you could sleep with two babies instead of one? She ignored me. I let her. But when the time came I took her over to her case (a toy case that Dad made for me when I was a baby) and asked her to pick out a baby to sleep with her in her big girl bed. She did. I put her down and closed the door, expecting to be summoned back into her room.

But she didn't cry. She made it through the night.

And she's done that every night. Really? All it took was offering a second baby to sleep with her?? (and several months...) Bribery is a Mom's best friend.

Every morning we've bragged on her. She gets a sticker that she promptly affixes onto her tummy next to her "beeboo" (belly button). She puts it on and takes it off and sticks it to everything she can reach and within three minutes it's lost all sticky to it, but it's still a precious thing to carry around.

So that's where we are. In an exciting, thankful place. (but there's also a tee-tiny secret pang of, gasp, where did my baby go?) The next big decision will be when we take the PNP out of her room. Do we do this now? Or do we wait until after our vacation, where we'll be taking the PNP with us in hopes that she doesn't end up sleeping with us?

Right now I'm leaning towards the latter... but maybe we should ask her?