Your baby doesn’t need a crib. This is something I never realized when I was pregnant with our first daughter.
When I was pregnant with Nora, we set up a perfectly coordinated nursery with a crib and all the matching decor. Her room was on the second floor and our bedroom was on the first, so we set up a pack’n’play in our room. Turns out she never slept in her room once before we moved to Nantucket. When Zara (daughter no. 2) was born, she too had the nursery that was barely used because I had realized the magic of cosleeping. Addie (daughter no. 3) was 6 months old when we moved fulltime in our RV and I tried having the pack’n’play for a bit before trading it out for a mat on the floor. That worked so well that by the time Vivienne was born I was a convert.
Vivi has never slept in a crib. In the early days, she slept in our bed and napped in my lap or in the sling. We did set up a pack’n’play in our room, but it was exclusively for using as a changing table and cloth diaper storage. Now that she can crawl, we’ve introduced her to a #montessoribed – a crib mattress straight on the floor. This allows her the freedom to wake up from her naps and crawl around or play with toys as she wishes. It encourages independence and also makes it *way* easier to put her to sleep because I can lay next to her and nurse her to sleep then roll away like a sneaky ninja. (I never could figure out how to lay a sleeping baby in a crib without waking them up.)
It’s funny the things that you figure out better by baby no. 3 or 4…
