A room of one’s own (or not)

photo-310Since my baby arrived about 12 weeks ago, he’s been nomadic. He’s slept in my office, and in the closet in my bedroom, and in various other random napping spots. But he’ll soon be too big to be sleeping in bassinets and car seats, and so he needed to be transitioned into the crib (a 2007 purchase that will likely be retired in 2018 or so after an amazing 11 years of continuous use). My 3-year-old daughter needed to be transitioned out of said crib, and we needed to figure out how to arrange four kids in three kid bedrooms. So, over the weekend, my husband and I spent some time discussing this and reconfiguring furniture.

The verdict: Kid #1 and kid #2 are now sharing what was kid #1’s bedroom. We moved the trundle of the trundle bed out of kid #2’s room into kid #1’s room. We moved the big bed out of kid #2’s room into kid #3’s room. Then we moved the crib out of kid #3’s room into kid #2’s room. Kid #2’s old room is now the nursery for kid #4.

Some of this was just practical. Kids #1 and #2 are 7- and 5-year-old boys, and hence seemed like the most likely duo to share (something they did in the past when we lived in NYC). They’d had Jack-and-Jill bedrooms with an adjoining bathroom before, and some chunk of nights I would find them arranged in the bed and trundle bed together in a room. Kid #2 was much more agreeable about moving into kid #1’s room than the other way around. This may be the downside of having a more agreeable personality generally, but I am grateful for it, and I have made it clear that he has the right to decorate chunks of the new shared room as he wishes.

We turned the second of the Jack-and-Jill rooms into the nursery because I envision, in a couple of years, the three boys sharing these two rooms in various configurations. Then the three boys can have the bathroom together.

The little princess (kid #3) keeps her own bedroom and bathroom. This was partly out of convenience. She has already seriously turned the place pink, and if I’d moved the boys in there, they would have insisted that I remove all the pink wall decals. As the lone girl, I imagine the bathroom privacy will become more important over time. On the downside, she misses out on the nightly sleepover/playdate the boys have with each other, but as with kid #1, she doesn’t always react well to having things changed on her.

Fortunately, she is thrilled with her big girl bed, which she has now slept in successfully twice. And a nice twist: she turned over all her pacifiers to me, because pacifiers don’t go in big girl beds. She’s spent two nights without them with nary a complaint. I’m not sure if there will be attempts at regression, but for now, wow. That was as painless as it could possibly have been.

Did you share bedrooms/bathrooms growing up? What was the configuration? Do your kids share now? How do you feel about male/female siblings sharing rooms?

Photo: Big girl bed. No binkies.

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