Help me figure out our options/twins in our already small bed.

[GandEmama]

We have 7 month old twin boys that slept together in a co-sleeper until somewhat recently when they became too heavy to both sleep there.

Now we rotate each night with one in the co-sleeper and one in bed with us.
This works well and they seem happy about it. They only wake up about once to eat, and more often than not whoever is in the co-sleeper winds up in the bed by early morning.

However, pretty soon they will be too heavy for the co-sleeper, and our bed is only a full size. It's just way tooooo small for all four of us. Me and DH are small people, but not that small.

So, I am trying to figure out where to go from here. We simply don't have the money to buy a larger bed. We do have a twin mattress that's currently not in use, but I don't want to put the twin and full together on the floor because we live with three cats and two dogs, and even though I vacuum A LOT, there is always more pet hair on the floor than I care to sleep so close to.

I think we have a frame for the twin bed, but I am not sure if it would be the same height as our full size bed. If I could make that work could I just put the twin next to the full and then put a rail on the open side of the twin? Is that a safe option?

Or what about buying a large crib and sidecaring it to the bed?

Or what about setting up the twin on the frame and then putting up rails on both sides but having it near our bed? Is it safe for babies to sleep in a twin with rails? It seems maybe there might be some safety problems with that, but I am not sure what they might be.

I really would like to use the twin mattress and avoid having to buy anything new if possible because we are on such a tight budget. But I want to make sure I am making safe decisions for us. And I want to have them as near to us as possible. We started out playing the whole co-sleeping thing by ear, and it turns out we think it works great for us!
It's just the logistics that we are having problems with.

TIA for any suggestions!

Any advice is much appreciated.

[greenbeanmama]

We tried the crib-with-a-side-missing-butted-up-to-our-bed with our first child. He didn't really sleep in it, but I didn't like that set-up. When he was about 14 months, we replaced the crib with a twin (with a guardrail) next to our bed. The height difference was about an inch between the two beds, but I figured that he was mobile enough that he could handle it. I never was very concerned about suffocation, getting stuck between the two mattresses, etc. It worked really well. We eventually moved his bed to a different place in the same room, so that he got used to sleeping "on his own" before we moved him to his own room at age three.

With two babes, I don't know. Are they crawling yet? My daughter isn't mobile yet (well, for someone not "mobile", she sure can scoot around in bed!), and that's what we're waiting for to move in the twin bed. If you do the twin bed option, could you have it in a corner? That way, the wall would cover more of the falling-off edges than a guard rail would. We've tried both guard rails and putting the bed in a corner, and both worked well, but it is harder to make the bed when it's in a corner! If you try the crib method, you could always try to find one at a garage sale - we found one that was in good shape and was new enough to meet safety requirements, except they were selling it cheap because the side didn't move up and down very well - which worked great for us, as we didn't even want that side on the crib.

The guard rails that we have are ones that kind of "smoosh" the mattress - they slide under the mattress like others do, but instead of coming up alongside the mattress, they actually are on top of the mattress and lock in place. I really like them, as there is no way for the child to get caught between the mattress and the guard rail, which is a typical concern of parents. I can't remember the brand off the top of my head, but I could go check if you wanted me to (they're in storage right now).

I hope you find a sleeping arrangement that works well for you!