Big night.

Big, historic thing happening tonight: Alex's first night in her own room.

We spent the weekend putting the nursery together - assembling the crib and the glider we hadn't intended to buy (but it was so cheap! And it matched the crib!), cleaning, sorting the miscellaneous baby things that have been stored in her room for the past several months, arranging furniture. Unlike the kinds of nurseries people seem to put together while they're pregnant, there is a notable absence of a matched theme. For example, there's a nice shaggy Central American animal-themed wall hanging, and there's also a poster of the lights of nighttime earth, as seen from satellites.



And there's a, um, a crib for Alex to sleep in.

I'm having a hard time with this. For a lot of reasons, including the increasingly poor quality of my own sleep, I'm ready to stop co-sleeping. Alex has already done fine being put into our bed in the evening and sleeping there alone for several hours until I come to bed. I've transferred her co-sleeper into the crib so she'll have a familiar sleep context, and I've put her down wrapped in the sling, which smells like me. I'm going to sleep in her room for the first few nights to help smooth the transition, so "first nights in a crib" aren't also "first nights it takes Mama a little longer to get to me when I cry." (Her room has a futon couch, so it's not as penitential a plan as it might sound.)

But I'm still feeling pretty edgy.

(I just went upstairs to check on her. She was fast asleep, and fine.)

Here's the coolest thing about Alex's room: she's got a nightlight that projects images of stars, moons, and ringed planets on the ceiling and walls. (Updated to add: It's from children's Ikea.) Here's how it looks with the lights off:



Alex will be fine. I can still take good care of her when she sleeps in a crib.

I just want to be a good mother, and changes in mothering practice make me nervous.