Since the day we found out I was pregnant with Campbell, I have been fretting over sleeping arrangements. Our top floor only has two bedrooms (ours and Sam’s). We have a guest bedroom in the basement but I didn’t want to put either kid that far away from our bedroom. A few of our friends with the same floorplan as ours have gotten pretty creative (including a friend who moved the master bedroom to the basement–making the guestroom a closet!) but in the end we decided that Sam and Campbell would just have to share a room!
Of course, this meant that Campbell would have to sleep in our room for the first few months until she started sleeping for longer stretches. I was really nervous about this since I had to kick Sam out of our bedroom on the first night he came home from the hospital. He was just so LOUD. And as a new mother, every little squeak made me jump. Luckily, this time around it was much easier to have Campbell in our room. We did get a noise machine to drown out some of the little noises, but I was also just much more relaxed.
However, after a couple of months, having her in our bedroom was getting trickier. It seemed like we were all waking each other up at night, so Ben and I decided to try having Campbell sleep out in the hallway. This was actually a GREAT arrangement and I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner. We turned Sam’s noise machine up a little higher so that if she started crying it wouldn’t wake him up (since she was closer to his room now). And we shut the door to our room so that we couldn’t hear her little noises (of course we could still hear her if she cried).
But just the other week, we finally decided it was time to put Campbell in Sam’s room. We figured it would be best to get her used to the environment as soon as possible. And we wanted to give Sam time to adjust. Sam was SO excited about it, and he still asks us every single night, “Can Campbell sleep in my room again tonight?”
So far it has been great. Putting them to bed is no problem at all. Campbell usually falls asleep in minutes and then Sam continues to talk to himself for 15 minutes to an hour but this does not wake up Campbell. And on the rare occasions that Campbell wakes up in the middle of the night (not early morning), Sam doesn’t even wake up. And if he ever does, I am not really worried because he goes back to sleep easily if he is awoken in the middle of his sleep. (In fact, I have started taking him to use the potty most nights at 10:30 or so when I go to bed to avoid morning accidents or early morning potty requests. He stays almost completely asleep the whole time. It’s pretty hilarious.)
However, mornings have been a little rough. When Campbell wakes up early, so does Sam, and he doesn’t go back to sleep. He does seem to be getting better at resting until it his time for him to get out of bed. But even on days Campbell sleeps until 8, Sam has been waking up at 7:15 or so. This is at least a full hour earlier than his normal wake-up time. I think this is because he is so excited that Campbell is in his room that as soon as he stirs, he fully wakes up. Luckily this doesn’t wake Campbell, and luckily he knows he has to stay in bed until we come get him. However he has been a little crankier on these mornings. The upside to this is that Sam has been napping great in the afternoon! (They do not nap in the same room because their naps are not perfectly overlapping)! It used to take him over an hour to fall asleep some days but now he always falls asleep in minutes and sleeps for at least three hours! I am hopeful that as Campbell becomes a better sleeper and Sam adjusts to the newness of rooming with sis, things will keep improving.
And here is a pic of Sam showing off his new toddler comforter that I made for him as part of an effort to create some kind of unified decor in that room. That is a whole other, totally incomplete, project!
