WARNING: The following incident may elicit anxiety, panic, or fearful thoughts in parents with young children. Parents of children who haven't successfully climbed out of their cribs yet may not wish to proceed. Read on at your own risk.
This is an unexpected and reluctant transition (for Matt and I for the most part). Luke has been such an exceptional sleeper and waker (he stays in his crib and can play for up to an hour by himself after he wakes up) that we have been able to enjoy sleeping in (usually till 8:30am, sometimes 9am if we are lucky) - a privilege that not many parents can claim (I'm only saying this with thankfulness and utter humility that it didn't happen as a result of the sleep training efforts on our part). So transitioning Luke to a toddler bed was a rude and abrupt end to our nocturnal bliss...
It happened on a wednesday morning (October 25), when I was making Luke's breakfast in the kitchen as he chattered away in his room. Then came my cue - "Mommy open the door!" I chuckled and blithely whisked down the hallway to do as told - only to find that the door was LOCKED! How could that be?? I did not hear any thumping sound of falling nor cries of injury. Did Luke managed to scale out of his crib with a smooth landing and locked himself in? But he had never done that before! As I was still searching for reason in my stream of consciousness, Luke's panicky cry pierced through my muddle-headedness, as I heard him frantically turning the doorknob. "Mommy, Luke wants to come out!" he cried. I forced out a calm voice, and mustered up as much composure as I could, "Oh honey, it's ok. The door is locked. Let mommy try to find a way to open it for you..." I started looking for the keys to his room, but we just moved in a few weeks ago and I recalled that the landlord was still trying to recover a few room keys. I called Matt out of his sleep for help, and the handy man that he is, he swiftly brought out his tool box and tried to pry out the door knob - but with no avail this time. It was mounted as sturdy as concrete on the door and did not even budge. By then Luke was totally freaked out and screaming on top of his lungs. Luckily his room was child-proved so we started encouraging him to play with his toys, and even tried to instruct him to tip over his lego box so that he could stand tall enough to turn the door knob (yeah right), as we called the locksmith. Good news was that the locksmith was available, bad news was that he could only get to our place earliest within 45 minutes. But by this time, Luke has followed our instructions and was entertaining himself with his toys, occasionally sliding some of his thin books under the door to "communicate" with us. He also manipulated his repertoire of vocbulary to give us a play by play of what he's doing behind that closed door (Truck is going there! Fuzz is dancing. etc). Finally the locksmith arrived, and after a few try of prying (just as Matt did), had to resort to pounding out the whole door knob with a hammer to open up. Luke was happy to see us, and the first thing we did was to ask him to demostrate how he got out of his crib. As if he's putting on a stunt show, he immediately and skillfully showed us his maneuvers, and that was the end of his crib days.
Luke's crib is the 3-in-1 kind that can transform itself into a toddler bed, so after the locksmith left, we took down the side of his crib and installed the side railings to his new bed, which he took about 3 days to get used to without falling out of his bed (onto a padding that we put on the floor as precaution). Luke's enjoying his newfound freedom to get in and out of bed whenever he wants, while we mourned the further loss of ours.
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