Our Little Escape Artist

As if we needed more to keep us busy, the same day we brought Tessa home from the hospital Lincoln decided he was through with letting his crib confine him. We'd put him in his crib and a minute or two later he'd be rush into the living room with a very pleased look on his face. This was pretty impressive since we'd already turned his crib around so that the high back of the crib was the one facing outwards. While it was annoying to have our little boy flying free, it was also scary since it is quite a drop from the edge of his crib to the floor, so we were pretty worried about him hurting himself, especially since he'd already bumped his head once doing his little Houdini routine.

Plan A was to just put him in his pack-n-play, since he'd never escaped from it before. That was a disaster. We put him down for a nap in the pack-n-play and a little while later Christi went back there to get him and found Lincoln in his pack-n-play but the room a disaster. He'd gotten out, pulled all of the clothes out of the lower drawers of his dresser, pulled stuff out of his closet, and in general made it look like a tornado had rolled through the room. We think Lincoln thought he had a pretty good alibi since he was back in his pack-n-play when Christi found him.

He was kind enough to demonstrate his escape technique for us

With the pack-n-play no longer a viable option, we moved on to Plan B. Lincoln escapes from his crib by getting his foot up onto the short crib wall (which was against the wall) and using that to leverage himself up over the crib's side-wall. Plan B involved moving his crib into the corner so that one side-wall was completely blocked off, and putting cardboard on the other side to keep him from climbing out. It worked, but as you can see from the picture below, he tried his darndest to escape. He was pretty upset the night we put this in - I think he was enjoying his new-found freedom and didn't appreciate our attempts to contain him.

We knew Plan B was only a temporary solution, so we went to work on a Plan C right away. Richelle found out about a product called a crib tent, and after doing some research ordered one right away. We bought a Cozy Crib Tent II ... it's technically made for a 48" inch crib/crib-mattress, but it worked just fine with our 52" mattress. This thing is fantastic! Problem solved!

I wish we could say that his escape attempts were limited to the crib. As scary as falling out of his crib seemed, he's made an even more frightening habit of occasionally trying to slip out of the house! He'll push something over to the door to stand on, undo the bolt lock, and then open the door. This truly terrifies us, so we installed a slide-lock (viewable in the photo below) to keep him from getting out. We may eventually have to break down though and get rid of the lever-style handles on our exterior doors, but at least for now our little Houdini has been thwarted!