Before living in our current home, our growing family was crammed into an 800 square foot apartment. A new season in our lives began when we moved to a small community outside of Rochester and found ourselves in a fantastic starter home with 4 bedrooms. Our house is not (by American standards) considered to be a large home, but to us it felt like a mansion!
So naturally, my two little kids were given their own rooms. My husband and I had a bedroom and we had one room left for an office/guest room. This worked fine for a while and we quickly acquired many new toys and things to fill up our space!
Then, along came our third baby. Our baby son stayed in our bedroom for the first few months and eventually when he was old enough to sleep through the night we put him in with his older brother. Our daughter still had her own room and this seemed like a natural arrangement that could last long-term. We didn’t feel like each kid “needed” their own room and we really liked having a guest room. Separating the boys and the girl made sense to us given the fact that eventually they will desire some privacy. I had to share a room for many years growing up and always wished I had my own room. So I assumed that my daughter would have a similar opinion.
But here is what happened- my daughter felt like she was missing out on the fun of room-sharing with a sibling. She also began to voice her disdain of being alone. One day we let her sleep on the floor of the boys room. We had guests who were sleeping in her room, and since we still kept a toddler mattress around we made her a little bed in the room with her brothers.
We ended up doing this a handful of times and each time she would beg to stay and the boys wanted her to stay too. We tried having her go back to her own room but it was never met with much excitement.
So we talked with the kids a lot about room sharing and how to manage the space in our house and eventually we all came to the conclusion that it was time to put them all in the same room for good. We used our garage sale money from this year to purchase a triple bunk bed and made the final arrangement. Right now we are still in the process of reconfiguring our guest room and what will be a home office but for the meantime we have focused on the kids room and making it work well. We certainly haven’t worked out all the kinks yet and it is not Pinterest-worthy by any means. The kids need to take turns in the room or use the bathroom to change for the day and that is still taking some getting used to.
So far, there are a few things I really like about this arrangement:
- All of my kids’ clothing gets put away in 1 room of the house. Just yesterday I brought up two baskets of clean laundry and dumped it all over their floor. We all sat (after a few jumps in the laundry heap and throwing clothes up in the air) and sorted the laundry into three piles for each kid. Then the kids put away their own laundry. It was the fastest putting-laundry-away session we’ve ever accomplished together.
- The majority of their toys are in one place too. Sure, they each have a few special things that belong to them individually but for the most part, all the toys are fair game and I love this about how they play. The Barbies, Paw Patrol pups, and Lego guys are all on the pirate ship going to a “war”. After the “war” they all go to a “party”, and then to the “store”, where of course they buy coffee and cereal.
- This arrangement has forced us to maintain better organization and pare down on the number of toys we have (and clothing too!). But I love how paring down and keeping it all in one place seems to be simplifying life a little bit.
- Putting them all to bed and doing our bedtime routine all at the same time is both efficient and sweet. The whole family gets to say goodnight to each other in one room at the same time.
- Finally (and my favorite reason) sharing a room is fostering and encouraging their relationships with each other. The toy sharing, being in close proximity, compromising for the benefit of everyone, doing the bedtime routine together, all of this and more is helping to solidify a strong sibling bond among them. Yes, they fight; yes we have other challenges now with them room sharing, but I know that we will look back on this season (however long it lasts) with fondness and know that it strengthened their relationships with each other.
And that makes my mama heart very happy.
