Before Purchasing a Baby Crib
Today, with so many different options and styles available on baby cribs, choosing the ideal, perfect crib for your baby can be a rather daunting task. Before you ever leave your house to go shopping for a baby crib, you need to take the time to determine your budget and determine what features are the most important to you for your baby crib to feature. Once you have done this, you can let the hunt for the most elegant baby cribs begin. Below, you will a couple of important features that your baby crib should include in order to help you to get started on your personal quest.
Safety Standards
As a new parent, you surely already know that all baby cribs have to meet certain standards for safety. Any of the new baby cribs that are on the market that you purchase are going to meet the minimum requirements set by the government. So, you can rest assured that if you assemble the baby crib based on the instructions provided by the manufacturer and properly use the crib, even the cribs that are least expensive are going to be safe enough for your baby. A crib that is safe should have a tight-fitting, very firm mattress, there shouldn’t be any broken or missing hardware or slats and there shouldn’t be any cutouts in the foot-boards or head-boards. The slats shouldn’t measure no more than two and three eighths inches apart, which is about the width of a can of soda. The corner posts shouldn’t be any higher than one sixteenth of an inch.
Drop Sides
One of the crib features that you may use most often, are the drop sides. Most baby cribs come with single-drop, fixed or double-drop sides. A crib that has fixed sides will be great for those parents that are tall and if the crib is only going to be occasionally used. However, most parents out there are going to want at least one side of the crib to drop, so that the baby is able to be lifted in our then out of the crib with ease. Most of the baby cribs that have the double drop sides would be nice if the nursery is going to be big enough so that the crib doesn’t have to be put up against a wall.
Lowering the Crib Sides
By now, you are probably wondering how the crib sides drop. First, there is the knee push which is when you lean your knee against the side of the crib and it lowers the side. This is quiet simple and because of that, this is the most common type of crib purchased today. Secondly, you have the trigger, which is where you use both hands to squeeze that triggers that are normally located at each end of the side to release the side of the crib. However, you may find that this isn’t quiet that simple when you are holding a baby. Next, you have the fold down crib sides that are easy to use and very convenient. You need to make sure that the fold is high enough so that the baby is maintained from climbing out of the crib.
