Portia gets her big baby bed…

Portia has been sleeping in a Safety 1st Play Yard (by Dorel), however at the rate she is growing she is rapidly approaching the load-limit of the bassinet that accompanies the Play Yard. Also, the copy that we bought her has a miss-stitched seam on the bassinet, and Dorel have been horrible at replacing it, first telling us it would take six weeks, and now having a different story every time we call them, we are now at the point at which we have been asked to send in the original purchase receipt, so that they can “have that on file” when they eventually get around to replacing our Play Yard. Pathetic service – however more about that in another post.

Portia has also developed a mild form of Torticollis, so we thought that getting her a bed with open sides will help as we can position the crib in such a way that the interesting things for her to look at would be located to a point where she is naturally encouraged to turn her head in the opposite way.

So, this afternoon we headed down to Ikea and picked up a brand new Gulliver Crib in Birch, which we have been eying for a while, as we like the way it is assembled, and you can get really nice mattresses for it. Also, since we live in Vancouver where property pricing is at a huge premium, we wanted something compact, that would last her fair amount of time — this crib accomplishes that by having two positions for the mattresses, and you can remove one of the sides and add in a beam, so that a toddler can use it for a bed as well. This crib is very well made and very easy to assemble. The finish is smooth and classy, and the material is great — I don’t know exactly what wood it is made from, but it is a light wood, almost like pine, but appears to be much finer grained than pine.

Ikea sell a number of accessories for this crib, ranging from custom mattresses to fitted sheets, and a nylon protector that you can attach to the rails when the little one starts to teeth, thus preserving the value of the crib, should we decide to sell it once Portia has out grown it.

After assembling it, and placing some self-adhesive backed felt padding under the legs to prevent the crib scratching our laminate flooring, we put a mattress and a brand new fitted sheet into the crib, and with the timing spot on we put little one into the bed. Even though she is growing like a weed, she still looks so tiny in the crib. Here are some pictures of her in it, swaddled and sound asleep.

Tagged as: Baby Bed, Cat, Cribs, Gulliver Crib, Ikea, Pack & Play, Sleep, Sleeping, swaddle