Free Range Chicken Toddler Bed

I recently learned that free range chickens (from industrial organic farms) are rarely ever frolicking happily in fields and pastures, like I had wanted to believe. In order to be qualified to use the label "Free Range" the farms just have to have an open door in the coops that "could" allow the chickens to go outside if they wanted to. (http://www.upc-online.org/freerange.html) Apparently sometimes the door is kept shut during the first couple months of a chicken's life (to prevent disease) and then the door is opened later on. The chickens, who by now are used to life inside, rarely want to leave.

Which brings me to Addie and the toddler bed. Addie, when in her crib, used to wake us up every morning by saying repeatedly "Addie wake now! Addie wake now! Addie wake now!" until we went to pick her up. She was very excited and ready for us to turn her crib into a toddler bed and we were very excited about the possibility of her being able to get out of bed on her own to find a book, and not have to yell "Addie wake now!" We told her that when she woke up in the morning, she was free to get out of bed and look at books or play with toys and that she wouldn't have to wait for us to get her out of bed anymore. Very exciting! It was a bit of a rough start that night as she wasn't quite used to her new bed. But from 11:30pm to 6am, she slept soundly. At 6am we woke up to "Addie wake now! Addie wake now! Addie wake now!" Mike turned to me and said "She's like a free range chicken!" And she was, after two years of being dependent on us to get her out of bed, she had no idea what to do with her new found freedom! Fortunately for us and her, she had it all figured out by day 2. And now I'm able to wake up a little bit later to the beautiful sounds of her reading to herself from books that she selected after walking across the room to her bookshelf and then carrying them back to bed.