Bunk bed mystery

It was 4AM and Claire stumbled into our room.

“Drew jumped on my head and woke me up,” she said.

We really weren’t sure what happened, so we helped Claire back to her room. Sure enough, Drew was fast asleep laying sideways across Claire’s pillow. Manina lifted him into the crib, and he didn’t even stir. Strange.

You see, it was Drew’s first night in his “big boy bed”. We had kept telling Drew that once he was finally potty-trained, he could move from the crib to the top bunk of the bunk bed, where Claire occupies the bottom bunk.

When we had put Drew to bed that night, he was his usual rambunctious self — he kept Claire up just chatting away, and even got out of bed a few times. This prompted Manina to remove the ladder from the bunk bed. Drew didn’t like that much, because he couldn’t escape. But this added to the middle of the night mystery? What had happened?

We all went back to sleep, but were still perplexed in the morning. Had Drew climbed down using the window and the wall and then jumped on Claire’s head, but then fallen fast asleep? Didn’t seem likely. Had he sleep-climbed down somehow and curled up like a cat on Claire’s head? No, the climb would have been too rigorous to sleep through it. Had he fallen off, hit the floor, then climbed into Claire’s bed? We doubted it, since he probably would have been hurt or at least startled enough to start crying for his mom.

We were really stumped.

In the morning I went in to further investigate the crime scene. Claire’s head had been assaulted by a slumbering Drew, who was apparently totally unaware of his actions.

Then I saw it. Near the head of Drew’s mattress lay his trusty blankie, which he never sleeps without. The blankie was hanging over the head of the bed. I looked at the top mattress from where Claire was sleeping and saw a sizable gap between the headboard and the first support slat. Mystery solved.

Drew had snuggled up at the head of the bed and the mattress slowly pushed the support slats down toward the foot of the bed, increasing the gap. The gap was finally large enough for Drew to fall through from the top bunk, landing on Claire’s head (and remaining fast asleep). We’re lucky that he didn’t get stuck between the mattress and the headboard, and we’ve since fixed the slats and moved him to the bottom bunk!