"Ring The Alarm"

The eagle has landed. The chicken is out of the pot. The vulture flies at midnight...

Okay, I'll come out and say it... Keeping Connor in his bed until a reasonable hour of the morning (read: NOT 5 a.m.) has become more difficult than trying to arm wrestle a steel beam.

In mid-November, Connor finally figured out how to escape his crib. It's one of the only milestones he's achieved behind schedule, and we feel quite fortunate to have kept him in bondage for as long as we did. If we could just get him to poop in the toilet, we'd be in business.

For the first week of his newfound freedom—or, life in a "big-boy bed"—he stayed put all night, but he soon figured out that he was in charge of when he got out of bed. 11:30, 1 a.m., 5 a.m.; it didn't matter to him. At first it proved most difficult just to get him to go to sleep. Once we mastered the intimidation necessary to keep him in bed at bedtime, he began to get up in the middle of the night. Even a particularly frightening barrage by the three dogs thinking that he was an intruder one night at about 3 a.m. didn't stop him from attempting nightly escapes on random occasions. But, we eventually managed to put a stop to that behavior as well. Soon, though, he began attempting to get up at insane hours of the morning. Seriously, I didn't even know that 4:30 a.m. existed until just recently.

The main problem is that Connor's bedroom is on the opposite side of the house as ours, and he is sneakier than a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, which makes sense, huh? He's so quiet in his exit that we never hear a sound on the baby monitor. Something had to give.

So, rather than locking him in his room—which Stacey responded to by throwing everything she owned out the window when she was a kid—we've installed an alarm on his bedroom door to alert us to his escape attemts. At least once a night/morning/nap, we're greeted with a cacophonous BINGBONGBINGBONG from our portable receiver that now gets toted around with the now-useless baby monitor.

So far, the system is working perfectly. In the one week since its implementation, Connor's escapes have been stifled at every turn. There have been no further instances of him appearing at his grandparents' bedside, Windex bottle in one hand, Windex-soaked stuffed animal in the other hand, saying, "My Daddy is asleep upstairs and I did a pooper!"