No More Monkeys Falling Off The Bed

As we transition from one child to two, we've been slowly preparing our son for this transition. One of the ways we are doing this is by "upgrading" our son to a "big boy bed." The only dilemma? There are no stores locally that sell bed railings! Well, I later found that is not actually true - they sell them at a bunch of the second hand stores, but I didn't think to look at any of those. And, being the impatient person that I am, I didn't wait for him to sleep in his big boy bed until after we'd ordered a railing - we improvised - of course, thanks to something I'd found on Pinterest. The link on Pinterest, just takes you to a picture - so I'll just post the picture here and you can just check out my blog instead.

Photo from Pinterest

The pool noodle I had purchased at the dollar tree was smaller around than the one in the picture above, but it still seemed to work fairly well - after we made some adjustments. We put a plastic mattress cover on the twin size mattress we used for my son, and we discovered quickly that the noodle was very slick on the mattress. It did very little to protect my poor guy from discovering the ground in the middle of the night.

But, thanks to my mom's genius idea, we found a solution! Rather than having the pool noodle directly on the slippery plastic mattress cover, we laid down shelf liner on top of the mattress cover and below the pool noodle.

And it worked!! I laid the liner the length of the noodle, although I'm fairly certain you wouldn't need to use that much.

It now stays in place and doesn't move almost at all. I think a slightly bigger pool noodle may be a slightly more effective as my son moves a whole lot, but the only time he's actually gone over the noodle was when he was already halfway over it when he fell asleep. I'd say this is definitely a good way to be thrifty, keep your kiddo safe and not spend a bunch of money that would make changing the sheets and remaking the bed a bit more challenging. I like this idea, a lot. And, it appears that my son does as well.