A New Room

Sickness is bad enough, but lately another problem of ours has been sleeping arrangements. A little clarification. After Erin was born last year, she mostly slept in the room with us. We had our bedroom set up in the laundry room/play room/back add-on with the sliding glass door/back door. Comprende? Thus, the baby's room was empty and unused. When it started to get cold, we decided to move Ian's room into the smaller baby's room and move us and the baby into Ian's room. Then we could close off the back room and save some money on our gas bill. And we could be closer to the baby stuff instead of having to change a diaper on the other side of the house. A year later, we have this problem.

If/when Erin wakes up in the middle of the night, she rolls over and sits up. She looks through the crib bars and sees me sleeping in the big bed 3 feet away. She stands up, jumps up and down and screeches like a banshee until I get up and get her. Then, we either have to walk and sing or lie down in the big bed and go to sleep (ha ha on #2). Since she's been sick, it is a tossup as to whether or not she'll go back to sleep without a commotion.


Since I have 2 children, sometimes I have to get up to go to Ian. I have noticed this: when I'm not in the room and she wakes up, she looks around and lies back down. She Goes Back To Sleep!
So for the last month I have found myself sleeping on the couch in the living room at different times of the night so she will go back to sleep. This has worked for all but 2 cases. One was the breathing episode and the other was a prelude to some really nasty diarrhea, so I can conclude that this method will work in all but dire circumstances. My HC may or may not be sleeping in the room during this, since he works evening/night shift, but even if he is in there sleeping, he can sleep through everything except a wet bed. But last night, he couldn't go in the room to sleep because the baby was just lying there awake, staring at the lava lamp. I had been sleeping on the couch, trying to wait for her to drop back off so I could go back to sleep (I can practically hear people rolling their eyes, but don't worry a solution is nigh) and my HC was home from work. It was about 6 am before we faced each other and realized that we had to do something about this. Finally. After 5 or 6 weeks of sick and not a full night's sleep for any of it, I am not looking my best and my reaction time is frankly embarrassing. My HC just wants to get in bed without being screeched at. It was quiet, so we sucked it up and decided to be the parents and to get in bed. Screeching commenced. My HC went straight to sleep. I was left to console, carry and sing to our noisy bundle.
So today after church, we moved.
After lunch and naptime, we cleaned out half of the back room and moved our bed back into it. Then we moved my HC's wardrobe and my drawers. The rest will follow eventually. Then I headed to walmart to get a rug, some blinds, a clothing rack (I will really miss the closet in that room, but I miss my sanity more. I need sleep!) and other things that we needed to make the rooms habitable. I'm pretty sure the tub of candy corn jumped into the cart all by itself.


So I have been cleaning and arranging Erin's new room and after supper she went in there and uttered a big "Hi!" to her new corner of toys and played until bedtime. The monitor is up next to my bed and my bed is on the other end of the house in an entirely different room. I am SO ready for this.
I am praying so, so hard that this is going to work. But either way, I am not going to miss the couch at all.