Anyone working on independence transitions with older siblings?

[~Megan~]

ds is 2.5 and we are would like him to be sleeping in his own bed by the time the baby is born.

I would love for him to be potty learned but its a lower priority than sleeping in his own bed. He's a flipper and kicker and it won't work well for us to have him in bed with us. If he's on dh's side he kicks him all night and he obviously can't be next to the baby.

Nursing gently would be a good thing for me. I don't mind continuing to nurse him but I'd like it to be a lot more gentle and a lot less frequent. Right now he's throwing fits and exhibiting really terrible behavior as he wants to nurse more but it hurts me so bad I'm trying to cut down. I know nursing pain as I've dealt with mastitis many times and thrush but this is way worse!

What are you working on this pregnancy with your kids to prepare them for the new baby?

[christinespurlock]

We've weaned our son who's almost 3. But the bed thing is still in the works. We put him in his bed (which is next to ours) but sometime in the night he makes his way over to me.

Beyond that just trying to get him excited about the baby and being a big brother.

[CallMeMommy]

Ugh, if anyone figures out how to get them to sleep in their own bed, please clue me in. DS is NOWHERE near ready to sleep in his own bed, he still has to be touching me at all times during the night. I'm so not looking forward to this...

[delightedbutterfly]

Our DD always has been really independant... but now we've moved and our playroom is downstairs... and she loves to be near us. Plus we are going through a really WHINY stage. It's driving me bonkers... and she's started hitting and scratching... which we have no idea where it's come from! I guess it's just those "terrible" twos everyone talks about... But she isn't terrible just going through a stretch when she's really whiny and frustrated.

Her vocab has grown in leaps and bounds but she doesn't realize that she doesn't get everything she wants.

I do realize part of it is probably the new house, me having a longer commute, she knows there's a new baby, she has a new room and a new big girl bed. And her daddy has been spending A LOT of time trying to get our suite in order to rent. So it's been lots of upheavel...

Potty learning would be nice but I'm not pushing it with how much has gone on. And I'm really cutting back on nursing because it's so painful... but I know she needs it and I think that's also bugging her. I just wish she would choose to wean... but I'm not going to force it yet.

Ok so that got me nowhere but it felt good to vent...

[Mom2Lex&Cay]

We've only been partial co-sleepers. We do it until about 9ish months. It differs depending our their readiness. DD1 is up one side of the bed and down the other, so she's terrible to sleep with. Anyway, we've found for us that after a certain point we all sleep better and our little ones wake less, but that's just us.

DD2 got a "big girl bed" (aka toddler bed) for X-mas and she moved from the crib. That went much easier than expected.

We're hoping to work on potty learning soon. I've tried half heartedly here and there, but didn't get much interest. I'm not sure that's gonna work out before July.

Our biggest challenge is that DD2 is a big momma's girl. She's always been very clingy and needy. (a big change from our super independent DD1) She's very much a lap "baby" and wants to be cuddled and held. I've tried to start the no more "up up" rule like I did when I was pregnant with DD2. It worked just fine with DD1, but she was a year older. It's not working at all with DD2. She still wants to be carried everywhere.

I've decided to relax and have faith that it will sort itself out when LO arrives. I may be setting myself up for failure here, but I'm not stressed in the meantime.

[SeekingSerenity]

I anticipate a few problems with DD and the new one. DS has his own bed, in the room with her and I. DD sleeps with me in the big bed, and DH gets the couch. But, simply put, there is no room for another bed and no way to transistion my kicker, flipper, all-over-the-bed-but-especially-on-top-of-mom toddler. In that huge king-size bed, with just me and a 2.5 year old girl, I'm usually hanging off the edge while she occupies 90% of the middle. I don't even know where the LO will be... next to me, squished up toward the edge?

I've contemplated bunk beds, with DD on the bottom, but honestly, I can't afford a new car seat so I have no clue where I'd come up with the money for that (even yard sales, rummage stores, resale shops... pretty much everything is above my means right now).

So I don't know. Right now there are so many issues... this is just one more, and something I'll just deal with as it hits me.

[JennaW]

SeekingSerenity-

Have you tried posting a "wanted" ad on craigslist for free bunk beds? There are some nice folks out there in the world who might want to help a Mama in need

Good Luck.

[Tiffanoodle]

My New Years' resolution was to have a 6 month break between diapers. And it worked! Ds hasn't worn even 1 diaper in 2008! The first week or so he wore pull-ups to bed, but now he's 100% in underwear! And barely any accidents! That was our "big boy" transition.

[~Megan~]

Originally Posted by SeekingSerenity

I've contemplated bunk beds, with DD on the bottom, but honestly, I can't afford a new car seat so I have no clue where I'd come up with the money for that (even yard sales, rummage stores, resale shops... pretty much everything is above my means right now).

Also call the hospital or fire station to check on free carseats. I know there was a place here that you could get them from.

[Red Sonja]

We're transitioning DD from the combo of our bed/her bed to sleeping with DS now that we've converted his toddler bed to a double bed.

If one of them would be interested in the potty before July then I would be ecstatic!

[4Marmalade]

We're working on the sleeping in their own beds for both ds and dd right now. Dd toilet trained on her own about a month ago and I weaned her about 2-3 weeks ago as well so we don't want to push her out of our bed and have too many changes at once. But she is a pretty adaptable girl, unlike her big brother, who is showing such resistence to sleeping on his own. He will now fall asleep on his own with the hall light on and us coming to check on him. We had a family meeting about a week ago and ds was in charge. At first he said that he thinks all kids should get to sleep with their parents for 100 nights. I quickly did the math and told him that he had slept with us for waaaaaaay more than 100 nights (he's over 5 now!) . So, he agreed to 9 more nights of crawling into our bed in the middle of the night. We made a paper chain and I think we have about 3-4 nights left. I'm really not sure what will happen after that. I don't expect him to just stop coming in but maybe, just maybe he will. Or at least go back to his room without a fuss.

I don't mind dd sleeping with us but I know ds would not want to be left out and would kick up a huge fuss so that's why we're working on both of them together. I wish they would sleep together but the few times we've tried that they don't seem to enjoy it. With twins coming I really think we need them out of the main bed. If they need dh at night that would be fine and he would sleep with them but there's no room for 6 of us.

[pazerific]

the bed thing is my biggest goal for now. dd will be 2 on saturday, so i think it's possible for it to happen in the next few months. i would love to see some PL action too, but if we get her in her own bed, that's good enough for me. we're planning on converting the crib she never used into a toddler bed in the next few days and just taking it one step at a time. :

[AmyC]

My daughter is a little older (she will be 4 next month) but she has passed some big milestones in the last little bit. She is sleeping on her own in her room, and she weaned. It (the weaning) happened over a long time....not something I encouraged because of the pregnancy but just something she'd been growing toward for the last 9 months or so. I wasn't sure how it would play out in the end, and I thought it was possible she'd continue to nurse through the pregnancy, but she let me know one day that she was done. She had been saying the milk tasted the same and there was as much as usual, so I don't think it was anything like that. A couple of weeks after her final nursing session (which was just a momentary latch, really), we found out I'm carrying twins. There might have been some kind of intuitive connection or sensitivity going on with her, but I don't know. I'm glad that I didn't have to pressure her, although the discomfort I'd had earlier probably pressured her some. (I didn't know I was pregnant yet, and just felt really irritable with her. I thought she'd damaged my nipples by latching & unlatching a lot while nursing with a cold--because of the congestion, she couldn't breathe while nursing and kept unlatching to take a breath--and when it was hurting to nurse her the next week I thought it was because of her irritating behavior during the cold.) I also, after finding out about the pregnancy, needed my husband to rub my back and shoulders while I nursed her to sleep in the bed....otherwise I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin and scream. The backrub got me through it, though, and she was already down to just nursing to sleep every third or fourth night, then maybe two times in a row, then a night or two off.....She wasn't nursing much, anymore.

She seemed very ready for both transitions....leaving our bed and weaning.

(She started out on an air mattress in our room, but it wasn't going so well. I think it was just having the mattress on the cold floor...she'd wake up. So we made up the double bed in the other room, and she's done great in there.)

[bluebirdmama]

ds has done awesome switching to underwear. He caught on so quickly - I was totally impressed. He still wears a dipe for nap and bed but often wakes up dry and he's to the point where he'll ask to use the toilet even with a diaper on. It only took a little over a month. We didn't start trying until he was 27 months.

He's also down to one nurse a day, at naptime. That's been a really slow gradual process. He was night weaned at 15 months because I was turning into a psycho from the 6+ night wakings while trying to work. He was at 3 times a day (plus when he would get hurt) when I got pregnant and we talked a lot about how it would be time to give up nursing soon and I suggested that he "think about it" but didn't force him. He still asks here or there and goes completely manic when he sees me topless - he jumps up and down laughing "I'm gonna hop on a boob!" But I think he's really just teasing because he gets a big dramatic reaction from me so it's more of a game. I'd love him to give up the nap nurse willingly but I kind of treasure the fact that it puts him to sleep in 10 minutes rather than the hour or more it takes at night time of him talking before falling asleep. There's something to be said for the fact that nursing means he can't talk and talk and talk.

The big challenges are getting him to sleep without having to spend an hour laying beside him telling him that it's time to be quiet and still and getting him to sleep in his own bed. My sleep is very disrupted by his kicking me in the back all night.

BUT - We'll be moving to a new town the month before baby arrives which will mean ds will have a lot of changes (new house, new baby, far from cousins who he sees every day right now - they live next door). It seems really unfair to expect him to have his own room and bed too. We'll get a King Size bed and see how it goes. He doesn't have to get totally independent all at once just because we decided we wanted another baby.