About ten months ago, we "officially" moved Ethan out of his baby room (the room with the crib) and into a room shared with Caleb. I moved all the boys clothes into their shared room, hung Ethan's name letters on the wall next to Caleb's, and did everything else I could think of to make the transition complete. The boys sharing a room (and a queen bed) went really well for several months, until, suddenly, it wasn't going well anymore.
Shortly after Ethan turned two, he turned into a full-fledged night owl and started fighting bedtime with the creativity and tenacity that is unique to him. Part of fighting bedtime was acted out by trying to keep his bed buddy (Caleb) awake as long as possible. Caleb, who is not a night owl and settles down very easily for bed at night, did not appreciate the incessant talking and poking designed to keep him conscious. So, the peaceful nighttime relationship between the boys quickly disintegrated. At first, we tried laying a line of pillows between them and forbidding Ethan from touching the pillows, but Ethan just got louder and Caleb still couldn't go to sleep. I'm not sure exactly when it was, but sometime in the late spring / early summer, we gave up on the boys sleeping in the same room at night and put Ethan back in his "baby" room. So he has been back to sleeping in his crib or on the floor in his old room for the past six months or so.
After Ethan moved out, Caleb's nighttime falling asleep was undisturbed, but apparently it got too quiet too fast, and Caleb started obsessing over the night sounds that he could hear from his bed. The "scariest" of the sounds was a very persistent owl that has been in residence in one of our trees since we moved into this house. So, Caleb started resisting bed time because he was scared to sleep in his room alone. He vacilated nightly on whether he preferred having his persistent little brother yakking at him while he tried to fall asleep or an otherwise empty room full of uncertain night noises. (His first choice was always that Mommy or Daddy lay down with him until he fell asleep, but that was a luxury he only enjoyed about once a week.) In a nutshell, we never really knew where anyone was going to sleep until bedtime.
Around the time that I got pregnant, what was left of bedtime's continuity quickly dissipated. The boys were taking long naps in the late afternoon and staying up until ten or eleven at night with Daddy at the helm (I went to sleep at like 8:00 every night), until they finally collapsed in whatever room they wanted to sleep in. This is when our year of musical beds reached its peak. After I started feeling better in October, I shortened Ethan's afternoon nap time and stopped putting Caleb down for a nap at all, so that they would go back to having a reasonable bed time. For the past two months, we've done a regular bedtime routine starting around 7:00 or 7:30, and both boys are almost always asleep (in their separate rooms) by 8:00 or 8:30, like they used to be.
When I sold Caleb's queen bed on Craig's list last month (to make room for the coming bunk beds), Caleb got freaked out about sleeping in his room again, so he's been spending most nights on the floor in our bedroom. Ethan always starts out in his room, but, if he wets the bed or wakes up with a bad dream, he ends up finishing the night in our bed. (I was joking with a friend the other day about the silliness of having a 4-bedroom house when we often all four sleep in one bedroom.)
Marcus and I are both hoping that setting up the bunk beds in a couple of weeks will start a new era of bedtime consistency in the Wagner household (at least until April). For one thing, I will be painting and setting up the crib room for Baby Sister in January, so that will be off-limits as a back-up for Ethan. And Marcus is about done with having kids in our bedroom, so I think that will be off the table after Christmas, as well (again, at least until April :). Hopefully, with a super-cool option like the bunk beds they will have, we won't even have to make them sleep in their room anymore because they will just want to! (A girl can hope!)
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