Roommates

Our plan all along for when we had a fourth baby was to move Alaina into Aubrey's room and to give the baby Alaina's old room. When Francie was born and and ended up being a girl, David and I talked about our room situation and decided that it made more sense to move the big girls into Jude's room and move Jude into Aubrey's old room. I know this is probably hard to follow, but Jude's room was definitely the biggest of all of our bedrooms. It's actually a bonus room that we use as a bedroom, and it's pretty huge. When we first moved into our house, we put Jude in that room because he had two twin beds, and Aubrey had a full size bed and there was really no good wall for a full sized bed in that room even though it was the big room. All along, I kind of expected our fourth baby to be a boy, so I figured it would make sense for for Jude to have the big room since he'd probably be sharing it with a brother one day. Well, when sweet Francie came along, David and I were talking about getting rid of Aubrey's full sized bed and buying two new twin beds and twin mattresses for Aubrey and Alaina, and it just hit me: we have two twin beds and mattresses already- why buy more? So, at that point, we decided to just do a major room switcheroo and move everyone around. Haha! We painted the two twin beds, the full bed, Jude's old room, Aubrey's old room, the crib, and now we're working on painting the nursery. Whew! It has been a LOT of work, but it really makes sense for the biggest room to belong to the two kids who are sharing. And if for some reason we ever need to use the nursery for something else, Francie can easily move in with Aubrey and Alaina. There's plenty of room :)

Ok, now that I've explained all of that, let me get to the point of this post. A couple of weeks ago, we had finally finished the painting and were ready to move the big girls into their new room! It was going to be a BIG transition for Alaina because not only was she going to be in a new room and sharing her room for the first time, but she was also going to be moving out of her crib into a big girl bed. Since we figured that the sleep situation would probably be bad at our house for a little while anyway, David and I decided that this would also be a great time to ditch Alaina's pacifier. (It was actually WAYYY past time to get rid of the night time paci because she was only getting more attached to it the older she got, but we've had so many big changes in our lives the past several months that we just kept putting it off.) Anyway, we decided to just rip the bandaid off and go for it all at once.

Alaina had still been taking a good nap everyday, but she had gotten to where she took FOREVER to fall asleep at night. So I was kind of hoping that she might drop her nap when we moved her out of her crib and just start going to sleep earlier at night. I still wanted her to have some quiet down time in her room every afternoon even if she didn't nap, and we knew that time wouldn't be very restful if Aubrey and Alaina were in the room together, so Aubrey now has her rest time in the playroom and Alaina has hers in their bedroom. We put Alaina in her new room for the first time one Sunday afternoon for rest time. It actually went well. I was STUNNED that she never even mentioned her pacifier! I don't know if you can fully understand what a miracle that is because this is a child who was OBSESSED with her paci. So that actually gave us a lot of hope for how that night might go....

So night time rolled around.... we put the girls to bed and, as expected, there was a lot of giggling and talking and getting out of bed. David and I had decided that we were just going to let them work it out and go to sleep on their own as opposed to going in their room a million times and trying to force them to go to sleep more quickly. We just thought that would be the best approach for us, and we hoped that after a few nights, the newness of sharing a room would wear off and they would go to sleep more quickly. That first night they were up pretty late, and Alaina woke up several times during the night. Every time Alaina would wake up, it would wake Aubrey up too. The first night wasn't as awful as it could have been, but it wasn't a great night of sleep either. They were both up BRIGHT and EARLY the next morning, too. That pattern hasn't changed a ton since then, but it's gotten a little better.

It's now been almost three weeks since we made the transition. Alaina has only napped a handful of times since she moved out of her crib. Unfortunately, she is also still going to sleep pretty late and waking up earlier, though. The other day, I realized that she's probably getting around 5 hours less sleep in a 24 hour period than she was. This means that she's been pretty fragile and cranky during the day :-/ I will say that she's going to sleep quicker than she was those first few nights, so we're hopeful that eventually she'll start falling asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow. Goodness knows she's tired enough to do that. I'm also seriously considering getting some blackout curtains for the windows. Her old room had one window... her new room has four. So it's a LOT brighter in there in the mornings, and that's only going to get worse after the time changes next month. Poor Aubrey is being kept up later at night and awakened earlier than she'd like in the mornings, too. She's taken a few naps during rest time since she and Alaina moved in together, and Aubrey hadn't consistently napped in YEARS. Thankfully, Aubrey has learned to sleep through most night wakings that occur.

All in all, I'd say this transition has been ok. I know I'm making it sound awful, and there HAVE been some really hard nights. But I expected it to be terrible, especially when we decided to ditch the paci too. So I've been pleasantly surprised. Now, if Alaina is still waking up several times a night and not getting enough sleep a month from now, I'll probably say the transition has been horrible. Haha! We are just still holding out hope that these sleep issues will resolve themselves in the not too distant future.

Hilarious sidenote: Aubrey has started calling Alaina her "roommate" since they moved into the same room. Hahahaha!

This is a post for another day, but around the time we moved the girls in together, Francie quit sleeping through the night :( I was SO bummed because she had been such an amazing sleeper. I'm hoping this is just a short little regression, but things seem to be getting worse instead of better. Between Alaina and Francie, David and I are up about three times each on any given night. I'm SOOO thankful that David helps me out with our kids at night. I wouldn't be functioning otherwise. We are planning to move Francie to her own room (from our bathroom) this weekend, so I'm hoping that we can really focus on developing good, consistent sleep habits then.

I really want to share pictures of our kids' rooms soon! There is still a lot that needs to be done in each of them. All of the big stuff is done, but we're still working on finishing touches like art and accessories. I always want to wait to post pictures until I have a true "AFTER" to reveal, but who knows when that'll happen, so I probably ought to just go ahead and share the "IN PROGRESS" shots ;) I'll need to actually TAKE some pictures before I can do that, though. Ha!