One bedroom with two kids: Sleep planning for baby & toddler
January 31, 2022 7:53 AM Subscribe
My partner and I are renting a one bedroom in Brooklyn, which we currently share with our 2 year old. With a new baby on the way, can you help me think through the planning for all of our sleep?
How our toddler sleeps now:
- We just moved her to the bottom bunk of a bunk bed, surrounded by a black-out curtain with a sound machine for white noise inside. She also has a 'time to wake' clock that turns green when she's allowed to get out of bed. We're still working on training her with that, but she's doing reasonably well.
What the plan is for the new baby:
- About 10 feet away from the bunk bed, 3/4 of the way into a closet nook, is a mini crib. We will also have black-out curtains that can close around (not too close!) to the crib area, as well as a sound machine inside there.
- We will plan to have our toddler's bedtime routine happen in the living room, as opposed to the bedroom, when the new baby is sleeping in the bedroom.
- When we attend to the new baby at night, the plan is to feed the child in our bed, which is right near the bunk bed. We may switch to add a chair near the baby's crib to be as far away from the bunk bed as possible.
What I'd like help with is:
- What would you suggest to help prepare the toddler for this room sharing -- particularly quietly entering her bed at night, as well as how to whisper and keep quiet for the new baby? (Right now she sometimes sings and talks to herself as she goes to sleep, as well as when she wakes up in the morning.)
- How do we address the toddler if she happens to wake in the middle of the night as we're attending to the new baby?
- Is there anything else you'd recommend we keep in mind? What are we not thinking of?
By the way, we're staying renting a one bedroom as a family of 4 for now because:
- it's an awesome apartment, building, and block
- the best way to save money in order to (hopefully eventually) buy a place is to not increase our rent and not pay for moving expenses.
We have a handful of months before the baby is due to arrive. We know that the first 8-ish weeks are likely to be rough, and we reserve the right to say we're crazy later and make a different decision, but for now we're sticking with this plan.
Thanks in advance!
How our toddler sleeps now:
- We just moved her to the bottom bunk of a bunk bed, surrounded by a black-out curtain with a sound machine for white noise inside. She also has a 'time to wake' clock that turns green when she's allowed to get out of bed. We're still working on training her with that, but she's doing reasonably well.
What the plan is for the new baby:
- About 10 feet away from the bunk bed, 3/4 of the way into a closet nook, is a mini crib. We will also have black-out curtains that can close around (not too close!) to the crib area, as well as a sound machine inside there.
- We will plan to have our toddler's bedtime routine happen in the living room, as opposed to the bedroom, when the new baby is sleeping in the bedroom.
- When we attend to the new baby at night, the plan is to feed the child in our bed, which is right near the bunk bed. We may switch to add a chair near the baby's crib to be as far away from the bunk bed as possible.
What I'd like help with is:
- What would you suggest to help prepare the toddler for this room sharing -- particularly quietly entering her bed at night, as well as how to whisper and keep quiet for the new baby? (Right now she sometimes sings and talks to herself as she goes to sleep, as well as when she wakes up in the morning.)
- How do we address the toddler if she happens to wake in the middle of the night as we're attending to the new baby?
- Is there anything else you'd recommend we keep in mind? What are we not thinking of?
By the way, we're staying renting a one bedroom as a family of 4 for now because:
- it's an awesome apartment, building, and block
- the best way to save money in order to (hopefully eventually) buy a place is to not increase our rent and not pay for moving expenses.
We have a handful of months before the baby is due to arrive. We know that the first 8-ish weeks are likely to be rough, and we reserve the right to say we're crazy later and make a different decision, but for now we're sticking with this plan.
Thanks in advance!
I think you might be pleasantly surprised at how much a newborn can sleep through. Every baby is different and so on but all 3 of my kids would sleep as babies with the dog barking, vacuum going etc. I think the tricky part might be the baby waking up and crying when the toddler is not yet quite asleep and then the toddler wanting to be awake while you tend to baby.
I would avoid letting toddler help with anything at night. Redirect back to bed with perhaps another sleepy song from whatever source you use for music.
posted by MadMadam at 9:02 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I would avoid letting toddler help with anything at night. Redirect back to bed with perhaps another sleepy song from whatever source you use for music.
posted by MadMadam at 9:02 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I've known a number of people for whom this just worked, no arrangements really necessary. But I know a couple of families that it wasn't that simple - in one case nursing was something of a struggle both for the nursing person and a jealous toddler and dealing with both simultaneously was too much, and in another the toddler just wasn't a deep enough sleeper for all the traffic from everybody else - and in those cases what worked best at least for the first 6-8 months (or however long the baby is nursing and/or needing multiple night interactions) was the living room was turned into another bedroom. And really, it was the nursing adult and baby sleeping in one room, other parent and toddler sleeping in the other. Once the baby would take a bottle in the night the adults could switch off nights, so everybody was getting the same number of uninterrupted sleeps.
Probably, for toddler stability, I'd say they continue to live in the real bedroom, and the baby gets the living room while they're not mobile.
I'd recommend picking up a cheap vibrating caregiver pager, as a way for the parent on baby duty to silently beckon a sleeping/otherwise occupied parent (put the receiver under their pillow) so that if one of you is trapped under a baby or dealing with a nuclear blowout or something in another room/bathroom you can request backup without extra foot traffic or noise in the toddler's vicinity (or waking the baby if the issue is the toddler). You're going to want to be able to put your phones on DND to sleep, so the pager makes that easy.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:14 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
Probably, for toddler stability, I'd say they continue to live in the real bedroom, and the baby gets the living room while they're not mobile.
I'd recommend picking up a cheap vibrating caregiver pager, as a way for the parent on baby duty to silently beckon a sleeping/otherwise occupied parent (put the receiver under their pillow) so that if one of you is trapped under a baby or dealing with a nuclear blowout or something in another room/bathroom you can request backup without extra foot traffic or noise in the toddler's vicinity (or waking the baby if the issue is the toddler). You're going to want to be able to put your phones on DND to sleep, so the pager makes that easy.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:14 AM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think this all sounds doable. What I think you want to avoid is a situation where you plan on having the toddler and baby alone in the room at the same time. It may be manageable, but you just never know how the toddler will react to a sibling.
For this reason, I would strongly consider this a situation worthy of a Snoo. We got one when we had 3 kids in a 2-bedroom apartment and it was absolutely worth it.
posted by luckdragon at 9:24 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
For this reason, I would strongly consider this a situation worthy of a Snoo. We got one when we had 3 kids in a 2-bedroom apartment and it was absolutely worth it.
posted by luckdragon at 9:24 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
After an accidental medication ingestion we had to rouse our sleeping toddler every hour. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, we had to shake her pretty hard. She also slept through a beeping fire alarm as well as bringing in a ladder to change the battery.
Our kiddo falls asleep independently so if she woke up when we rouse her, we let her fall back asleep. It sounds like your kid is pretty acclimated to sharing a room so I am betting it won't be a problem. I have friends where extended room sharing is part of their culture and they room share with two or three kiddos. Everyone adjusts and the parents seem about as sleep deprived as the rest of us.
posted by muddgirl at 10:50 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Our kiddo falls asleep independently so if she woke up when we rouse her, we let her fall back asleep. It sounds like your kid is pretty acclimated to sharing a room so I am betting it won't be a problem. I have friends where extended room sharing is part of their culture and they room share with two or three kiddos. Everyone adjusts and the parents seem about as sleep deprived as the rest of us.
posted by muddgirl at 10:50 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
We used a star chart for our 4 year old when we moved baby in-- any day where she didn't wake the baby up on her way out of the room or when she was a champ about getting woken up by baby in the night she got a star. We talked about how nice it was going to be to get to share a room (she would get nervous at night alone and was pumped about having a 'roommate.' ) It worked wonderfully and they still share a room 3 years later. Good luck!
posted by jeszac at 11:30 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jeszac at 11:30 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you haven't practiced bedtime routine with just one parent/with either parent, do it now. Our toddler was used to having us both on hand for bedtime (ah, pandemic parenting) and that made it tougher to get him to sleep smoothly when his baby sister showed up.
posted by february at 12:45 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by february at 12:45 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I actually suggest training the baby to sleep through noise disturbances rather than habituating them to the white noise machine. Vacuum cleaner, loud TV, clatter of pots while cooking, you name it.
My kids have slept through fire alarms (we had a malfunctioning one for a few months, it was hell), each other screaming, and a literal tornado. They will wake if shaken gently but random noise does not phase them in the least.
posted by lydhre at 7:18 PM on January 31, 2022
My kids have slept through fire alarms (we had a malfunctioning one for a few months, it was hell), each other screaming, and a literal tornado. They will wake if shaken gently but random noise does not phase them in the least.
posted by lydhre at 7:18 PM on January 31, 2022
Response by poster: Just wanted to follow up! Three months in and kiddos have never woken each other up -- it's epic! We have two sound machines (one for each of them) and stagger bedtimes so that the smaller one is asleep before the bigger one heads into bed.
We also prepped the older one, and began her 'different' bedtime (that is, outside of the bedroom rather than inside it) about a month before the baby was born, and she had lots of fun sneaking in when it was her turn to go to sleep. The baby was already in a good sleep mode by then, and by the time she needed to wake up, the toddler was in her sleep mode.
Thank you for all of your thoughts and responses! Here's hoping anyone else reading this in the future knows it's possible and workable from your comments and my experiences.
posted by knownassociate at 5:53 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
We also prepped the older one, and began her 'different' bedtime (that is, outside of the bedroom rather than inside it) about a month before the baby was born, and she had lots of fun sneaking in when it was her turn to go to sleep. The baby was already in a good sleep mode by then, and by the time she needed to wake up, the toddler was in her sleep mode.
Thank you for all of your thoughts and responses! Here's hoping anyone else reading this in the future knows it's possible and workable from your comments and my experiences.
posted by knownassociate at 5:53 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
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As for what to do for toddler when they wake up and a parent is attending to baby, unfortunately that's when the other parent has to wake up, too.
Congratulations on the new addition! There are some really lovely things about having siblings sharing a room - lots of extra opportunities for cuddles, sharing, and new types of joint bedtime rituals (toddler might really like helping put baby to bed and it kind of extends the 'wind down' time in a way that's really nice for toddler - and toddler will equally enjoy the special thrill of staying up 'late' after baby is asleep). Enjoy!
posted by Ausamor at 8:58 AM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]