Tuesday, January 12, 2010

A little house game

I would like to introduce you to our little house. It has been a great starter home, and really it's not THAT small. It's a 3 bedroom house with a completely finished basement that has a rec room as well as another room that could be a guest room or craft room or some such thing. Most of these photos are from our house listing when we sold the house.


We've lived in this house for what I think will likely be the most dramatically changing years of our lives. We've been here for 4.5 years. In that time we got married and had THREE kids. Many many changes happened in this house.

Now, I'd like to play a little game. Here's how it will work. I will show you a photo of a room - you will guess what purpose this room currently serves us, and then I will tell you if you are right or wrong.

Photo 1 - what's your guess?

A room for twins to sleep in? Ha! I think we've managed to get them both asleep in here at the same time a handful of times, and none of those have been in the last 2-3 months. I'm not sure why we still have 2 cribs in here except that we may as well leave the second one there until our move. Both babies sleep in this room, just not at the same time. These babies wake each other up every time they wake in the night. They do not remotely follow this whole "the babies won't wake each other" thing that advice about sleeping multiples seem to assume is a given.

That chair? Ugly but SO comfortable to sleep/nurse in. See those wings? It holds up my head instead of letting it loll to the side and get a crick that takes the rest of the day to get rid of.

Photo 2

Basement rec room you say? Of course, but it also doubles as my husband's bedroom. Why? Because after 5 months of waking many many times a night, he was no longer functioning. This is obviously an issue for work (and we NEED him to have a job) but also, on the weekends when he's home, I want him to be actively taking on some of the burden, something he can't do if he is too exhausted to function.

Photo 3

Our bedroom - yes, but it doesn't look remotely like this. First of all, at the base of the bed there permanently lives a playpen. Generally that's where Quinn sleeps because he is the SLIGHTLY heavier sleeper.
What generally happens is that Quinn sleeps in the playpen until he wakes up in the night after I've gone to sleep. At that point I bring him into bed with him to nurse and immediately fall asleep. He spends the remainder of the night in bed with me. I would SNEAK in for fear of waking up Quinn (hopefully I remembered to get some PJs out of my room before he went to bed) and just lie on the bed and try to sleep. I hate falling asleep without reading to unwind.

This is why I was in such a hurry to get a bigger house. Why I was willing to move in the winter and sell in December. When we move in, we are starting hard core sleep training. I have no issues with cry it out - with a few caveats. I can't handle letting them scream when they're in pain so there's always some regression during teething time. Also, I also don't think it's fair to let them suffer through the other baby's crying. In the new house they will have their own rooms and we can really get things back in order.

This past week I was sick and not only was I was afraid to sneak into my room at bedtime, I knew that my coughing would wake him up. So you know what I did? I found somewhere else to sleep, where I could still hear all 3 kids if they woke up and needed me.

Photo 4

My "nest" in the stairwell. I've been starting my nights here and eventually spending the remainder of the night split between my bed with quinn and the chair in the nursery nursing. The unexpected bonus, reading before sleep again, which I really really enjoy and missed (couldn't risk turning on a light and waking quinn. heck, i couldn't risk finding my book and book light and turning them on for fear of waking him up). I'm tired folks, and the stress of the move on top of it all is making me fed up and frustrated.

Less than a month to go. Less than a month to go. Less than a month to go.

10 comments:

Carrie said...

I can relate :) My husband had an air mattress set up in the basement for about 6 months when our youngest slept in bed with me. She refused to sleep in her crib and we all needed sleep so into bed she came.

Since he was the one working and needed to function outside the home, sleep was definitely a necessity!

I hope the new house makes all your sleep issues a blip in your memory :)

Chantal said...

Oh the things we do for our children eh! I also hope the move allows you to settle all the sleep issues. That will make life much more relaxed and enjoyable.
Take Care

CrAzY Working Mom said...

That's why I think as Mom's we require less sleep than men. I tell ya, my husband could sleep through a tornado!! He could just sleep the day away. Even if the kids happen to be gone, or heaven forbid sleep in...I am still up at the butt crack of dawn! *LOL*

Some day, we will miss this, right...RIGHT?!

Big HUGS!

Some kind of Mom said...

Hopefully, hopefully you can look back on this later and laugh. :) (insert nervous laughter here).

Lara said...

I'm trying not to think of the new house as a complete cure-all, but I sure hope it allows us some room to fix a bunch of the problems that we're causing right now (like me getting up 6-8 times a night to nurse them :P)
And I'm sure I'll look back at this time and laugh. And I'm glad I've recorded how it was :)

Rebecca said...

Oh my! That's definitely NOT a good situation. I'm so happy we have three bedrooms for the kids even if they aren't always there. Actually though Alex spends the majority of the night in his own bed and lately he has been trending towards sleeping 12 hours straight (not quite every night yet)! Yippee! Emily starts the night in her bed and is also trending towards 12 hours of sleep (not as much as Alex though) but when she wakes up she usually ends up in bed with us (Alex does a better job at falling asleep on his own) for awhile and then in the co-sleeper for awhile. I miss having a bedside table so I'm looking forward to getting rid of the co-sleeper. Thankfully Lizzie has been doing a good job sleeping lately because the nights she wakes up are the really tough ones!

I can't wait to hear how the new house improves everything!

Capital Mom said...

If I hadn't closed the door to the boy's room you would have seen a crib and a mattress on the floor where the husband slept on and off for a year and where we still sometimes sleep with the boy.

I love your nest. That was creativity at its best.

Seriously, don't know how you do it!

Rebecca said...

You are awesome. The things we do...

We aren't much better, we now are in 'teams' for sleeping - dh with ds, me with the babe. It just works and we all need sleep. It's not perfect, but at least we are all cuddling with someone ;)

Hope things balance out a bit better in the new place.

nonlineargirl said...

That is really hard. As much as I love them, if Ian and Mira had not been willing to sleep through one another's crying I think I would have thrown them both out the window by now. A month is nothing, you can do that and then hopefully get to read before bed again!

Anonymous said...

can't tell you what a relief it is to read about other parents of multiples with no bedtime rhyme or reason. Also? I wish I had a nest.