If I had it to do all over again, I’d skip the Pack ‘n Play and get this Baby Bjorn Travel Crib instead.
Image from Amazon.com
Don’t get me wrong; I loved our Pack ‘n Play. I just think I would have loved this more.
Brynleigh slept in the Pack ‘n Play until she was nine months old and then we moved her out of our room and into her crib upstairs. We took it with us when we went on road trips and it went with us to friends’ houses when we knew we’d be there at nap time or late at night. It really is a clever little invention!
But now that Brynleigh’s a little older, I’m starting to see the downside. She’s not old enough to sleep in an actual bed – first of all, I can’t trust her to stay in it when I put her to bed, and second, I know she’ll fall out in the middle of the night – so a confined space is still ideal. Remember, too, that she’s a little girl – small for her age – and so it’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of room in the Pack ‘n Play. No, the problem is with the design.
There’s a round hub thing at the bottom of the Pack ‘n Play that you have to lock into place during set-up. It works to lock the entire frame in an open position. It’s small, but it’s a solid, fixed structure in the middle of the bed, directly under the mattress. The little mattress isn’t super thin, but it’s made up of four panels. These panels wrap around the rest of the frame when it’s folded up and the whole thing makes a nice, rectangular package that fits perfectly in the storage bag. This flexibility is part of what makes the design so genius, but it’s also where I’m currently running into a problem.
The mattress helps to add stability and support to the frame. Without it, the bottom of the Pack ‘n Play is just a piece of fabric – with the exception of the aforementioned hub thing. So basically, you’ve got one rock hard spot in the middle of the bed, and because the mattress is a critical piece of the storage function, it can’t be thick and squishy to compensate.
The bottom line is that Brynleigh goes to bed in it just fine, but she inevitably wakes up three or four hours later and has to spend the rest of the night in our bed, kicking us, so that none of us gets a good night’s sleep. Multiply that by a ten-day trip, and your “vacation” is suddenly a lot less fun. And I can’t blame her, because I’d wake up, too, if I had to try to sleep with a boulder under my hips/lower back for hours at a time.
The Baby Bjorn crib is pricey, but it doesn’t have anything on the bottom to keep your little one from sleeping comfortably. If you think you’ll be using your Pack ‘n Play well into the toddler years, it might be a worthwhile investment.
On our recent trip to San Antonio, we discovered another option that works for us: we put this nap mat on the floor next to our bed and surround it with a pillow blockade. Miss B loves it (“Lay dowm on nap mat? Lay dowm on nap mat?”), and it rolls up for easy travel.
So…has anyone out there actually used a Baby Bjorn Travel Crib? Do you love it/hate it? Are my suspicions correct?
The Seifipour Family 
We have the baby born travel crib, but my son is now 19 months old and he has learned how to climb ot of it. The actual crib is nice and light weight, but I wish the opening was wider so I could put a crib tent in it, so that he wouldn’t be inclined to jump out at wee hours in the morning