“Y’all, our baby boy is not a baby anymore.” That is how iammarybennett opens a video of herself and a man carrying a wooden bed frame shaped like a car into her son’s room. The text on screen reads “Setting up baby boy’s big boy room,” and she sounds like she is still catching up to the idea: “I cannot believe it’s already time to transition him from his crib to his big boy bed.”
The theme came from her son. She says he is into cars now, “so a car themed room was only right.” The bed is a low, modern wooden frame with a rounded hood, headlights and wheels at the foot. The two adults drop a mattress into it, and she makes it up with a white fitted sheet printed with tiny cars and a neutral quilt stitched with a racetrack, his name embroidered near the bottom edge.
@iammarybennett How is it time for a BIG BOY BED already?! 🥺🚗💙 Our baby boy is growing up way too fast😅 I AM NOT OK 😭 From his new love for cars to personalized details that make his room feel SO JOSHUA, I wanted this space to be fun, cozy, and filled with little opportunities for him to learn along the way. 🥰 And after surviving the 2½-year sleep regression… WE SURVIVED!!🙌🏾😂 Now I can’t wait for y’all to see the final reveal + Joshua’s reaction! 👀🏁 #momsoftiktok #toddlersoftiktok #kidsroom #roomdecor #toddlerbed
She did not start the room over. She says that when she saw the bed and the bedding, which she could personalize, she knew they would work with the wallpaper already in his room and let her “build upon the design we already had in place.” The nursery pieces are still there in the finished space: puffy white cloud shapes on the wall, a white cube shelf, a white dresser. What changed is what sits on and around them. “It is so perfect, right?” she says. “I am literally obsessed.”
The details are where the theme shows up. The cube shelf now holds a pair of checkered racing flags and toy cars she parks one at a time, with gray storage bins filling the bottom row. A small car sits at the base of the lamp on the nightstand. She holds a navy cap with crossed checkered flags up to the camera in front of an open wardrobe, then climbs a step stool to hang small shirts and jackets on the rail. A stack of black tires stands in one corner beside a basket holding a football. Framed prints of race cars hang above the bed.
His name is the other theme. “When designing his room, I was also very intentional about including affirmations to cultivate his identity so he knows who he is,” she says, and she adds that she put his name on almost everything. The video backs that up. It is on the wall above the bed in large wooden letters, spelled out in wooden blocks along the top of the shelf, stitched on the quilt, and reduced to a single initial on a knit letter she sets on a ledge and on a sweater hanging in the wardrobe.
She explains that the repetition has a purpose. It gives them “little opportunities throughout the day” to work on letter recognition and on learning how to spell his name, which she says he enjoys doing every single morning. “He literally does it without me asking him at this point.”
Then she gets to the part of the crib-to-bed switch that no bedding can fix. “We finally made it through the two and a half year sleep regression,” she says, describing “two weeks of long nights pulling our hair out” while they tried to work out how to get him to stay in his bed and not tear his room apart before they came to get him in the morning. She does not go through what they tried. She says only that they figured it out and that he now goes to bed with very little fuss, on one condition: “Now we do have to keep the lights on, which I think is a healthy compromise.” Her caption sums up the stretch in two words: “WE SURVIVED!!”
The last corner she shows is the one she is proudest of. She says anyone who knows her son knows he loves to read, and “this reading corner was probably the best thing that I did for him as a baby.” It is a set of narrow wall ledges with picture books standing cover-out, hung low, with a plush bear-shaped chair that she sets down underneath. The final shot is a fabric banner on the back of the door, trimmed with checkered flags and little cars, that reads “oh, the places you’ll go.”
The video stops before the payoff. She tells viewers to stay tuned for the final reveal and for her son’s reaction to the room. In the caption she is less composed about the milestone itself: “How is it time for a BIG BOY BED already?!” and “I AM NOT OK.” She writes that she wanted the space to be “fun, cozy, and filled with little opportunities for him to learn along the way.”
For anyone facing the same switch, the most transferable thing she does is keep the bones of the nursery. The wallpaper, the shelf, the dresser and the cloud decor all stayed, and she picked neutral bedding on purpose so it would sit with them. The theme lives in the bed, the quilt and a handful of small objects on a shelf. When cars give way to the next obsession, those are the only things that have to change.
Her use of his name is easy to copy on any budget. A set of letter blocks on a shelf a child walks past every morning does the same job as the big wooden letters over the bed, and blocks can be scrambled and put back in order as a game. By her account, it became something her son does on his own every day.
The reading corner works for a simple reason that the frames make clear: the books face out and sit low. A toddler can see the covers and reach them without help, and there is a seat his size right below. She set it up when he was a baby and kept it through the redesign.
Her sleep update is the honest part. Moving out of a crib means a child who can get up, and she is frank that it cost them two weeks and ended in a trade rather than a perfect bedtime. Her approach is to decide what she can live with. For her that is a light left on. A child who stays in bed with the lights on beats a child who is up and emptying the shelves, and she is comfortable calling that a win.