Oh, the irony

The crib bumper arrived the other day. It was somehow a lot shorter than I had expected but since Rachel can only roll over one way we figured it would still work.

Before putting her to bed, I tied the bumper securely to the crib, doing my best to cover the area in which she tends to get stuck. After scrutinizing my work and double checking to see if the ties were securely fastened, I went to get Rachel ready for bed.

We've been trying to put her in her crib while she's still awake so that she can practice comforting herself--although she's not great at this, she does pretty okay. We put on primary songs for her and turn on the mobile and put either her hand or soother in her mouth and then we leave.

Some nights she will just fall right to sleep. Other nights she starts screaming the moment I leave and I go in there constantly to rewind the mobile, press the button on her little fish thing, put the soother back in her mouth, feed her again, change her diaper, stroke her hair, walk around with her, untangle her legs from the crib bars, or any other number of things.

This particular night was one of the more difficult nights. We went through our little routine of saying our prayers, kissing her head, tucking her in, cuing the music, and sneaking out of the bedroom. She did great...for about 10 minutes. Then I heard that familiar rattling of the crib mingled with her desperate caterwauls.

I opened the door a crack. She's come to know that if the door opens a crack that mommy is still around so she'll usually calm right down...this time she didn't...so I went in to check on her.

She had rolled onto her right side (something she rarely does) and got stuck in the crib bars on the opposite side of the bumper. In addition, she had pulled off one of her mittens and was working at getting the other one off.


I took her out, calmed her down and fed her, then put her back to bed. She slept all through the night and when we checked on her in the morning we found that she had turned 180 degrees and was all snuggled up, next to the bumper, with her head almost under the covers.

At least the bumper works sometimes!