Room for Four

As most of you know, I grew up in a family of seven: my mom and my dad, my three sisters, my brother, and myself. That’s five kids! And we all shared a tiny two bedroom house. That’s right.  For most of our childhood, my four siblings and I all shared one bedroom. Granted, it was a large bedroom- large enough to fit one single bed and two sets of bunk beds. It may sound a bit cramped and crowded, and by the time we grew older it did start to feel that way, but none the less I LOVED IT! Some of my most treasured memories are of staying up past bedtime, concocting ridiculous midnight rendezvous in the closet, talking in silly voices in hopes of convincing my baby sister that we were her ‘conscious’ so that she would do our bidding, and planning all the crazy adventures we would have the next day. I wouldn’t trade those precious moments of sibling togetherness for all the personal space in the world.

So, to me, making room for a fourth child in our three bedroom home now is no problem.

No problem. But still a question in need of an answer. Where will our four children sleep?

Room arrangements have been constantly fluctuating around here for a few months. When we first moved into this house last June we decided to make the smallest bedroom into a girl’s room for Josie and the bigger bedroom into a boys’ room for Jamie and Johnny. It worked well enough. Josie appreciated the novelty of having her own room for the first time and I was able to decorate the boys’ room in the vintage football theme that I’d been dreaming about. But complications soon arose. Johnny is a rather loud sleeper (he reportedly spent one night moaning, “Mama, mama, mama, mama…” for two hours straight) and he was continually waking up his brother. Whenever I asked Jamie why he wouldn’t stay in his own bed he would put his hands over his ears and say, “Non non (John John) loud!”  Jamie inevitably ended up climbing into bed with either Josie or me at one point or another during the night, every night. We continued in this way all through the fall and winter months. Soon Josie disliked sleeping alone and started to ask if she could sleep with the boys. Night after night she and Jamie were sharing one twin bed, with their heads at opposite ends. But Josie is a tosser, a turner, and a kicker. Jamie was being pushed out of bed and, again, finding refuge in the master with me. All of this was becoming too much nighttime drama for a pregnant, sleep-craving mama to handle. So it brought me to the decision that a bedroom change was needed.

The change began a few weeks ago.

Step 1: Combine Josie and Jamie’s beds into a single bunk bed set. Not as easy as it sounds! But after a couple trips to the hardware store and with the help of a good friend with some heavy moving and lifting, the beds were sturdily assembled.  Now Josie and Jamie both have their own bed to sleep in, but in close enough proximity to each other to make them happy. In the past few weeks the bunk has proven itself useful in more ways than one. It’s not only a convenient sleeping quarter, but it makes a great play area. I can actually manage to get laundry put away while the kids are happily pretending to be on a tall boat, safe from the bad guys below.

Step 2: Remove the crib and acquire a toddler bed for Johnny. A ten minute search on Craigslist found me a like-new toddler bed with white finish (exactly what I wanted) for only $30. I took the boys with me to Virginia Beach the next day to pick it up and I had the bed put together by bedtime that night. Johnny was more than ready for the transition out of his crib and into his big boy bed. He lays his sweet little head down on his pillow, says “nigh night,” and then pretends to snore “shew.. .shew…” Now, instead of a girl’s room and a boys’ room, we have one big kids’ room.

Step 3: Turn the empty room into a nursery. Now that we had some available space, it seemed only natural to make the extra room into a nursery for Jeremy. I hadn’t planned it this way (we originally assumed we would put Jeremy in the crib in the boys’ room) but now that a nursery was a valid option, I was excited to throw myself into the project. I love a good project! Especially when my husband is gone and I’m looking for distraction, and when I’m twenty-something weeks pregnant and filled with the nesting urge. It was mostly a lot of furniture assembly and re-arrangement with a couple purchases in between. Josie, Jamie, and Johnny all helped in their own ways. Josie stayed up late one night to help me paint the wooden letters to spell Jeremy’s name on the wall. Jamie and Johnny gave the crib mattress a good test with their bouncing. I added my own handiwork by painting a collection of wooden wall plaques with animals to match the new bed set that I picked out. And… viola!

So now we have room for four! I am feeling very happy with the way our new bedrooms came together. The past few nights I have tucked Josie, Jamie, and Johnny into their beds and given each of them a kiss and then I have walked down the hallway and into the nursery. I sit in my glider, glancing around the room, and I can’t believe that in a few short months I will be nursing a tiny newborn boy in that exact same spot. And while I sit there with sweet baby dreams dancing in my head I also listen down the hall at the hushed whispers of the other three kids chatting to each other.  And I can’t help but wonder, “what wild adventures are they plotting?”

Dressed in their PJs before bed