Sharing a room

Sawyer, Carson, and I got back from our trip to Milwaukee on Thursday, September 8th. Alex and I decided to just bite the bullet and take Sawyer's bed out of our closet (a kid should only have a Harry Potter bedroom for so long) and put him in Carson's room! I figured that it'd be the best transition possible since they had been sleeping in Milwaukee for the past week or so.

So I managed to clear out one of the dressers in Carson's room. We ended up moving it into our closet for more storage space for us. I found a super awesome way to fit all the boys' clothes in Carson's closet, and the organization of it actually makes me a bit giddy. We had an extra crib mattress that we put in place of where Carson's crib used to be. And we moved the crib to the other side of the room for Sawyer. I even managed to move a "bookshelf"-type thing into their room to house their board books and a few toys.

We managed to convince Carson that his mattress-on-the-floor (we don't have a toddler bed or anything) was, in fact, his new, super cool big boy bed. And honestly, I thought moving them into the same room would be a nightmare. But it's been going a ton better than I expected!

Granted, Sawyer has still been waking up once a night and sometimes it wakes Carson. But almost always, Carson will go right back to sleep. and Lately, Carson has sometimes been waking up. Sometimes that wakes Sawyer, but really, it's not too bad!

The system of putting them to bed involves giving Sawyer his bottle first in the dark room and rocking him a bit. During that time, Carson will watch a little bit of Little Einsteins (his latest obsession), and then I'll just take Carson into the room, tuck him in his bed, snuggle him for a couple minutes, and sing a song. And that's that! (Or, if Alex is home, Alex will snuggle Carson while I give Sawyer his bottle.)

It's helped a lot in a few different ways: 1) Carson doesn't have to wear zip-up jammies backwards anymore; now instead of taking his pj's off and pooping/peeing in his crib, he'll just come out of the bedroom when he wakes up in the morning (and sometimes that doesn't even wake Sawyer!) 2) the boys typically wake up between 7 and 8 am now, which makes it a lot easier to go and do stuff in the morning. 3) Because they both wake up earlier, they will both take a nap at about 1:30 or 2 pm. It's glorious to have Carson napping again, since he wasn't for so long! Granted, he doesn't always nap and granted, sometimes I have to bribe him to lay down in his bed with some fruit snacks, but hey, I will take a nap from him any way I can get it!

Now ... if only I could get Sawyer to sleep through the night again. We used to just be able to let him cry it out, but now doing that in the same room as Carson would just wake/keep up Carson. Hmm..the quandaries of life as a stay-at-home mom!