Thump. I jumped up from the couch, startled by the noise. Running into my younger son’s room, I saw him on the floor. “Are you okay?” I asked. “No,” he said. He says “no” when he actually means yes and he seemed okay.

But I wasn’t okay. He had climbed out of his crib.

I had been waiting on this night for the past few months. Unlike my older son, who didn’t climbed anything at that age until he knew where he’d put his hands and feet, my younger son (nicknamed Little Bird) is much more indiscriminate. I had seen him balancing on his stomach on the rail of the crib at my parent’s house. He’d almost managed to swing a leg over his crib at home. We knew it was going to be any day now.

Of course, we anticipated transitioning him out of a crib would be bittersweet, as all big milestones are.

But this one also held an undercurrent of dread. Honestly, we wanted to keep him contained as long as possible. The first night we switched my older son to a toddler bed, he got up more than 100 times. (We counted.) He also quit taking naps. How the hell were we going to handle two kids in this situation?

Rolling with it was the only choice though. We gritted our teeth and moved his mattress to the floor. His crib transformed into a toddler bed, but we couldn’t take apart the whole damn thing in the middle of the night.

There it sat for the next few days, as we searched through the basement for the necessary hardware to turn it into a bed. Even after my husband put the toddler bed together and moved the mattress back, Little Bird demanded, “No, bed on floor!” He liked the mattress easily accessible for bouncing and without a pesky bedrail he kicked in the middle of the night. Honestly, half-snuggling with him on it was kind of fun.

As much as I would have liked to roll with his preference, it quickly became untenable. The kids kept walking on the mattress with their shoes on and it took up way too much space in his small room.

Around the same time, we had to switch my five-year-old out of his toddler bed. We had kept it for as long as possible because he liked the comfort of the rail. It kept his stuffed animals close and him from falling out. But besides being old for it, he was simply too tall. His feet could kick the end of the bed!

Like the crib, the time for the little bed had come to an end. With sniffles in the back of our throats, we helped him pick out “a big kid bed.” My mother-in-law even sent us Mario Bros. sheets (his absolute obsession) in recognition of the occasion.

As my husband took apart my older son’s bed, he had a lightbulb moment. What if we used the mattress from our older son’s bed to supplement Little Bird’s bed? He didn’t like the rail, but we didn’t want him to fall out. Perhaps we didn’t need the rail as long as there was a soft place for him to land. I was skeptical, but shrugged and said, “Try it, I guess.”

The next day, my husband relocated the mattress under Little Bird’s bed. It stuck out just enough to catch a wayward sleeping child. That night, Little Bird was willing to climb into his bed without a huge fuss. It wasn’t a magic wand to solve our sleep problems, but at least he was willing to sleep in his bed again.

These nights, everyone goes to sleep in their own beds, although I sit with Little Bird until he develops the self-control to stay in his bed long enough to fall asleep. The add-on mattress has become quite handy for that purpose too.

While we could have told Little Bird he had to use his bed, I’m so glad we were able to think creatively about the situation. By listening to our kids and their needs, we managed to find a solution that suited everyone. Finding that third alternative isn’t always possible, but it is so very sweet when it is.

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