Empty Nest

Big news in the Ingiosi household! Olivia is now sleeping in her crib and not in the cradle [or our bedroom]. She's been sleeping through the night since she was about 5 1/2 weeks old, so I've been pushing for this transition for a while. Frank, however, felt that she was too little to not be in our room. I finally put my foot down two weeks ago for a few reasons.

1. She's too big for the cradle, as evidenced below:

2. Frank had been waking her up in the morning while he was getting ready for work. Well, to be fair, he would get ready in what would be her bedroom. Unfortunately, he hit the snooze button about 3 times before actually getting out of bed... not many people, beside Frank, sleep through that many alarms.

3. Our room gets incredibly hot; the air conditioning works in every room but ours. We are pretty sure the vent is blocked, but we've been too busy (or lazy?) to fix it. As adults, we manage by keeping the bedroom door open so air from the other rooms almost makes it into ours, and we run an oscillating fan. This is not safe for an infant. Research has shown that the risk of SIDS is greatly reduced with a lower air temperature and a fan.

4. While numbers 1 through 3 should have been good enough, they were not to an already overprotective daddy. However, on Friday, July 17th, I put my foot down when I discovered Monty, our youngest cat, playing with the tiny little fist you saw hanging out of the cradle in the above picture. The sight of him batting around her hand sent me into mama bear mode, and I demanded that Frank do what he had to do to get our daughter into her crib that night.

"Doing what he had to do" involved him picking up particle board so that he could install our SECOND monitor in the crib. This monitor, the Angelcare by BebeSounds, is a sound and sensor monitor. If the sensor does not pick up motion for 20 seconds, an alarm sounds. The sensor portion needs to go under the mattress but on a solid surface, and since Olivia's crib has springs under the mattress, we needed the wood to effectively use the monitor.

Olivia was perfect in her bed. We gave her good night kisses, and she slept like a champ!
But, poor Daddy! He worried about little Olivia too much. So....
How did Olivia do? Well, despite Daddy sharing her room, she didn't stir a bit. In fact, when she woke up in the morning, she was her usual chipper self.


And for the first time in 14 weeks, Mommy got the best sleep ever. The end.