HELP! Crib Choices

[thewhyzyrd]

My wife and I are expecting our first and had selected a beautiful - static sided (conversion) crib and were getting ready to order it until my Mother (with the best of intentions) asked, "Are you and your wife going to be able to reach down and lift a toddler out of the crib easily? What if you are pregnant with your second as the mattress gets lower?"

Can anyone help us? Are the drop side that much easier to use? Is reaching into a static sided crib not a big deal? The only thing the book mentions is height and my wife s 5'7" which we expect would not be a problem.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[psych]

I think at 5'7 she should be more than OK with a static crib. My husband is 5'9 and he does not lower the drop side to lift our son out of the crib. I'm short, so I absolutely have to drop the side. There's no difference between static side cribs and drop-side cribs when they're in the highest setting, but once they start sitting up (and then pulling up to standing) and you have to lower the mattress, it is a lot easier to lift older babies and toddlers out of a drop-side crib for shorter people.

One cautionary note is that I often see parents complain that their mobile toddlers are able to climb out of their cribs. I never quite understood how they could do it because my 2.5 year old is quite the climber and he's above the 95th percentile curve for height and he is still unable to climb out of the crib. Then I saw the crib of a friend whose daughter was able to climb out - it is a static crib and one of the sides (that faces out) is lower. There's a huge difference in how much more contained my son is in his crib and my friend's daughter. She had to move her daughter to a toddler bed setting when she was fairly young (before 2). At that age, it can be problematic to move toddlers out of a crib because they don't quite understand boundaries and that they have to stay in their bed. So that's the only thing to consider.