We'd been working every evening of that week to get the bed painted and it was finally ready for him to sleep in on Friday night (6/17). When Rhett got home from work, we ate dinner and then he and Courtney started putting the bed together. After it was set up, we noticed that b/c of the design and placement of the bed, there would be about a 6-inch gap between the mattress and the wall....we just could not push it close enough to the wall to eliminate the gap. I said, "surely he will not fall in this small 6-inch gap!" I thought it would be much more likely for him to fall off towards the foot of the bed where there is no rail (the safety rail starts near the headboard and goes probably 3/4 of the way down the bed...but the opening at the foot is large enough that he could fall out there). We decided that we'd pull the trundle out part of the way so that if he fell off, he'd hit the trundle mattress and not the floor (and it'd be a shorter fall). We also attached what we call his "music box" (the musical part of his crib mobile - minus the mobile, obviously) to the safety rail so he could still turn his nighttime music on just like when he slept in his crib.
Here he is in his new bed for the first time....
and one of the first things he does is jump on the bed - silly boy!
Anyway, by the time they got it all ready, it was a little past Caleb's bedtime so he didn't actually go down until probably 9:15pm that night. My main concern was that he would be scared or confused and cry forever or that he'd decided to explore and get in and out of bed (even though we hadn't had much of an issue with that with the toddler bed). To our surprise, he was actually asleep within like 20 minutes and he didn't seem fazed by the new sleeping arrangement!
Everything was going great until around 2am when I was awakened by the sounds of him screaming and crying. I knew he must have fallen off the bed so I hurried in there expecting to find him either on the trundle or on the floor. When I went in, I could not see him anywhere and I was totally confused (I didn't turn the light on but he's got a night light so you can still see pretty well in there). I crawled into the bed looking for him and still did not see him right away. Finally (this all happened w/in a matter of 30 seconds but it seemed like forever) I see that he has fallen into that 6-inch crack that I thought he'd never fall into! He was vertical and you could only see from his head to the tops of his shoulders. I pried him out and held him for a little while. Poor guy was a little scared and I'm sure totally confused as to what was going on! I don't know how he managed to get into that darn crack, but he did! After he calmed down, I layed him back down and went back to bed myself. He took about 30 minutes to fall back asleep. Of course, I could not go back to sleep until he did so I was awake and thinking for that 30 minutes. I decided that I'd go in and stuff some pillows down in the crack the next time I woke up to go to the bathroom. I wanted to give him time to be good and asleep before I went in there.
I woke up at around 5am and went to the bathroom. Then, I went into his room and stuffed some pillows down in the crack to prevent him from falling in again. I then went back to our room to get in bed and as I was walking right by my side of the bed, I stepped on something. It felt a little soft and squishy so my first thought was that it was dog poop (because for some reason our dogs poop and vomit on the carpet in the middle of the night more than I would like them to...) But then I thought maybe I was imagining things because I didn't smell anything. Right after I got back into the bed, I turned the video screen on the baby monitor on and attempted to use it as a flashlight to see what I'd stepped on. When I looked, I saw what looked like a small snake slithering under our bed! "Surely not!" I thought - I mean, I have been known to see "things" (spiders, roaches, and other creepy crawlies) in the middle of the night and wake Rhett up to kill them....only to find that there is nothing - ha! I guess that is one of my fears! Anyway, I took the baby monitor and crawled down to the end of our bed to look over the foot and guess what....I saw it again! A little snake tail slithering under the bed!
Now I was convinced that I wasn't seeing things so I shook Rhett awake and said "there's a snake under our bed!!" Of course, he is totally dazed and confused since it is early morning and I've startled him awake. He says "are you sure it isn't one of the dogs?" (as in, their tails sticking out from under the bed). "NO! I promise you there is a snake!!", I say. So, being the "man of the house" he grabs a flashlight out of his night stand and looks under the bed....and he doesn't see anything. "I think you're seeing things", he says. "NO! Look again - there is a snake under there!" SO, he moves some stuff around and looks again.....and this time, he sees it - a garden snake is under our bed!!!!! Ok, I realized that garden snakes are harmless, but THERE IS A SNAKE UNDER OUR BED AND I DON'T CARE WHAT KIND OF SNAKE IT IS, IT IS STILL A SNAKE AND IT'S IN MY HOUSE!!!!!!! Talk about getting the willies. Oh my word. I started feeling a little sick to my stomach and wondering if snakes are like roaches...where there is one, there are more! I asked Rhett and he assured me that they are not like roaches, but I was still completely freaked out. So anyway, Rhett removed the unwelcomed visitor (I won't tell you what he used b/c you might not ever want to eat at our house again, LOL) and he threw it over the fence into the neighbors' yard (hopefully it made it that far!). Honestly, I had a hard time getting back to sleep after that. I kept imagining when I stepped on it and how it felt soft and squishy.....eww, it gives me the willies again just thinking about it.
We are assuming that it got in during the hour and a half the carpet cleaning guy was at our house that morning. He had the front door slightly cracked to accomodate the hose attachment of his cleaning system. I don't know how else it would have gotten in otherwise....but that means it was in our house from like 10am on Friday morning until 5am on Saturday morning - yikes! Where was it that whole time?!?! If that is not how it got in, then we've got a problem somewhere in the house that we don't know about - eek! I have honestly not been able to stop imagining snakes in our house ever since this little incident. I don't know when I will ever get over it. I just keep thinking that I'm going to find another one...especially at night when I get up to go to the bathroom. Hopefully not! I can't believe that out of every square inch of our house, it just happened to be right where I stepped! What if I had not stepped on it? How long would it have been in our house? How and where would we have found it? I shudder to think!!!!
So as you can see, Caleb's first night in his big boy bed was an eventful one! Since then, we've kept pillows stuffed in that pesky 6-inch crack and Caleb has not fallen into it again. We also have not seen anymore snakes....and let's hope it stays that way!
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