Night before last, I fell asleep pretty early in the evening while getting C to sleep in our bed. C sleeps with us most of the time, and we have a bedrail on my side of the bed, and Jon is usually on the other side of the bed. So she can’t roll off. But even when Jon isn’t there, at 18 months old, C isn’t prone to suddenly crawling to one side of the giant, king-size bed (best purchase we ever made) and leaping off while I am in bed with her. Plus, I am generally very aware of her movements while we are snuggled up together.
But the other night, while just the two of us were in the bed together, and while I was very deeply asleep, I suddenly heard a loud THUMP followed by a small whimper. I knew immediately that I had just heard 30 lb C (yes, she’s a big girl) fall off of our very high bed onto the hardwood floor. I screamed, Jon came running from the other room, and we observed her lying motionless on the floor beside the bed – on Jon’s side.
Oh my God, I thought, she’s knocked out cold!
I frantically scooped her up and put her back in the bed, while Jon turned the lamp on so we could see whether we needed to dial 911. Pretty quickly, though, it became clear that she had been still on the floor because she hadn’t really even woken up from the fall. And as we poked at her and moved her limbs, she was just annoyed that we wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. She was fine, luckily.
Sometimes I am truly amazed that children survive childhood.
And yes, we are adding a second bedrail.
6 Responses to “Things that go bump in the night”
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funny how hard they sleep. i was downstairs yesterday, doing laundry and puttering, when i heard (and felt) a huge crash. seriously, the cork floor reverberated through 2 rooms. since my c and i were the only ones home, and he had gone back to bed after 2 hours of select baseball at near-dawn, i went running for his room. he had apparently decided to roll himself into a blanket on his couch instead of making it up to the loft bed, and while the couch actually becomes a futon, he didn’t get so far as to remove the pillows. so all of his brawny 12 yr old poundage came crashing down. i went all the way over to make sure he wasn’t bleeding, and he was curled up into the blanket with his good old bear. even covering most of the floorspace he didn’t look quite so big anymore.
I think it is some kind of crazy rite of baby-hood to fall off your parents bed – it happens so often… my girl was 9 months old when it happened to her. Like you, I was sound asleep after my hubby had gotten up for the morning and she scooted over to his side of the bed & off. I felt so guilty. Luckily, like yours she was okay. Amazing that they usually are!
All good toddlers fall out of bed at least once. I had a kid once, not a toddler, but still fairly young, fall asleep (or not fully wake up to start with) on the toilet, fall off, hit his head on the side of the tub, and continue to sleep on the bathroom floor.
Worse, though, was my friends’s preschooler who fell off his bed and, quite literally, scalped himself. There were toys on the floor, but they never figured out what he hit….
A friend from Harlan, Kentucky said, in their area, if you don’t fall out of the bed before you are a year old they will put pillows down and give you a gentle push out. It is bad luck not to fall out of the bed at least once before you turn one, a superstition I hadn’t heard about.
this is why toddlers are rubbery….they bounce!
Taking the mattresses off the frame and putting them on the floor is also an option.