Sleeping arrangements

Technically, we have a three-bedroom house, so you would think it would be easy to work out where Eleanor will be sleeping once she leaves our room. However, one of those rooms (the very nice large attic room) is our office, so there is no spare room.

Rosemary’s room is pretty tiny and only just fits her bed (cotbed in bed form), a wardrobe, chest of drawers and bookcase. It also has awkwardness, in that there’s a radiator on one of the long walls and a chimney pipe that comes up from the gas stove below on the other, making the placement of a full-sized single bed (or bunk bed) difficult, perhaps even impossible. If the radiator were relocated, a bunk bed could probably be squeezed in.

Our room is quite big and would probably make a pretty nice room for the two of them; one where they could play as well as just sleep. But then where would we go? Rosemary’s room would maybe fit a double bed and maybe a chest of drawers, but probably with almost no space on either side of the bed, if any. So, we’d probably need to store our clothes elsewhere.

The other option would be for us to move into the office and just keep one desk in there and then have another desk in the small room, with the girls in our room. Or even, somehow, try to squeeze the whole of the office into the small room. Not sure that would work, though, as it consists of three large desks with a computer on each (one of them could go, of course) and Rosemary’s desk where she now comes up to draw for a bit while we’re working. Of course, that could go into their room if they had a big room, but it’s nice having her come up with us for small chunks of time and I have visions of her sitting there doing her homework when she’s older. Perhaps even sitting at the other desk, checking the Internet for information about the Egyptians or the Vikings (that’s what they learn about at primary school, isn’t it?).

In the meantime, we need to work out what to do when Eleanor outgrows her crib, which is fairly imminent. Rosemary’s supposed to get a big girl bed and Eleanor go into the cotbed (back in cot form). But we don’t really want to get an ordinary big girl bed, if we’re going to have to get a bunk bed in a year. We don’t want to move Eleanor in with Rosemary until she’s sleeping through (Eleanor, that is, Rosemary’s pretty much got that sorted, apart from occasional awakenings for the toilet), because that would disturb Rosemary.

Rosemary’s solution is the simplest – she says Eleanor can just come and sleep in her bed with her and she’ll scoot over. Maybe we’ll just have to go along with that. Or we could just let her sleep in the buggy all the time.

So how did you work out the sleeping arrangements when you added an extra child to the family? Did you have problems when you had your first baby? I have friends who slept in the living room while their child had the only bedroom, for example.