The floor bed is one of the things about the Montessori approach to educating children that tends to shock people the most. "What? You don't have a crib? Your baby sleeps on a mattress on the floor?"
The idea is to set up the child's environment in a way that helps him/her develop movement. The more freedom children have to move, the more they move. The more they move, the more they strengthen their muscles and develop themselves.
Along these lines, we also try not to use common baby contraptions that limit movement, such as swings (since the movement is done onto the child) or infant seats (since the child's movement is restricted to a vertical plane rather than a vertical and a horizontal).
In a Montessori nursery, the entire room becomes the crib. The doorway gets closed off with a gate, and the child is free to move around their room as they please. The room is set up to be as safe as a crib would be.
Matt and I knew we would probably move before Henry started crawling, so we didn't child-proof the room from the beginning. Although our four month-old son isn't crawling, he is definitely moving! When we
transitioned from co-sleeping to putting Henry in his own room at two months, we really started to notice Henry's ability to roll and move. Although he wasn't rolling during the day, at night, we would find him off his mattress and several feet away. Honestly, we wondered if perhaps our dog, Hoss, was dragging him off the mattress so he could take Henry's spot!
It turns out that all the work Henry does with movement all day long has really helped him develop his core strength. By three months, he was rolling from his stomach to his back and from his back to his stomach.
Henry's ability to move made us realize that his floor bed was not set up in the best position. The bookshelf posed a hazard. So now, each night before we put Henry to bed, we move his little mattress to the center of the room, so Henry has plenty of room for his double barrel rolls in the middle of the night. We position Henry's mattress right in the middle of a giant 4' x 6' rug. Honestly, we would much rather have Henry roll off his mattress onto a comfortable rug than roll into the wooden slats of a crib.
I do wish we had room for a larger mattress. Ideally, we would have gotten a full-size. A larger mattress would mean that Henry would be less likely to roll of his bed in the night, and it would also be more comfortable for me while breastfeeding in the middle of the night.
Also, we ended up combining his movement mat with his floor bed, because we have limited space. That's why there's a mirror and a mobile by his bed
The one thing we did get right was the thickness of the mattress. Initially, we had a 5-inch mattress but we exchanged it for
this 3-inch mattress from IKEA. I could not imagine watching my son roll off of anything higher than 3-inches.
Overall, we're very happy that we opted for a Montessori floor bed instead of a crib.
Definitely let me know if you have any questions!
Also, if you're interested in talking more about how to implement Montessori in the home, consider
joining our e-mail group!
I found this quick and simple recipe (thanks to one of your recommendations!). It calls for creamed spinach, which apparently my local Whole Foods doesn't carry. Also, they happened to be out of frozen spinach, so I opted for frozen mixed greens instead (think kale, mustard greens, etc.).
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