very recently odin has been having a little difficulty staying asleep in his crib and the cause seems to be his newly acquired ability to scoot himself around while he's sleeping. sooner or later we'll hear a very characteristic "hey, something's wrong here!" cry and discover that he's rolled himself into an uncomfortable corner of the crib; other times it looks like he's trying really hard to roll himself out of the crib, only to get himself worked into a frenzy when he can't. sometimes if we reposition him in the crib he'll fall back asleep, but more often than not, after a few hours, he's back to his mobile antics.

i guess we should be relieved that the crib is preventing him from falling to the floor, but we decided to experiment with putting him in a Big Boy Bed ( previously known as The Guest Bed ), which is in the nursery to see if having a larger surface area might help him to stay asleep longer. to prevent him from hurting himself we removed the box spring and put the mattress directly on the floor and surrounded the bed with a rolled up blankets, so if he were to roll off the bed he wouldn't hurt himself.

we've tested the new sleep setup during naps and, well, the results are astounding. he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps, rolling and scooting from one end of the bed to the other for two and three hours at a time.

i'm not sure if it's immediately a long term solution, since we're still a little wary of him rolling off the bed in the middle of the night, but he sure seems to enjoy his Big Boy Bed and i think we'll probably transition him permanently out the crib sooner rather than later.

today, after a particularly long nap, he decided that it would be big fun to read in bed. such a Big Boy in his Big Boy Bed!

the concept of having infants sleep in beds instead of cribs is advocated in "montessori from the start" book that we've been reading, but i think we tend to agree with some of the reviews of the book. aspects of the book is seems logical, but other recommendations just don't pass the "smell" test - such as not reading fantasy books because they're not grounded in the "real world".

so, as with most parenting books, we take what makes sense for us and ignore 98% of the cruft :-)