I grew up in a (much) smaller house than the one I live in now. I never, prior to moving in here, would have thought to describe it as too small. We have four bedrooms. We have a separate dining area/ den/ man cave/ whataeveryouwannaturnthatroominto. We have three bathrooms. We have a garage and we have a storage shed in the backyard.
However.
We also have those previously mentioned four children.
Eddie and I have, of course, the master bedroom. We use one room - a very awkwardly shaped room - as the toy room. We moved the boys into a bedroom together around the time Karis was born. It works . . . for the most part. A few months ago, we decided we'd combine the remaining room into a bedroom for Zhariah and Karis and a guest room for whenever anyone sleeps over. Have you ever tried having an 11-year-old and a one-year-old share a room. Little hint: It does not work.
Zhariah couldn't stay up late for fear of waking the baby. The baby would wake Z up early . . . yadda, yadda. It just didn't work so we moved Karis into the toy room and she's been there since. And, thanks to the awkward shape of the room, her bed had to sit in the middle of the floor. Not against a wall or any kind of cute placement. Just plopped down in the middle of the floor. Fun.
She's moved to a toddler bed though and, thankfully, it will fit under the sloping ceiling. I decided to clean up the room today and got the genius idea to move some things around. Since it's a long room, I thought I could give it the illusion of being two different rooms - a toy room AND a bedroom.
I should've taken before pictures but, to be honest, I'm not sure I'd want anyone to see just how messy my little Messmakers can be.
But.
This is what it looks like now:
One side of Karis's room:
A couple things:
1) She's using one of the boys' old toddler beds. We didn't spend a ton of money on toddler beds because, well, we didn't. So now we don't have those nice, sturdy oak ones that work with any color bedding. We're left with the primary colors that totally do nothing for the pink "bedding."
2) She has no baby girl bedding so she's making do with a gorgeous afghan my Aunt Karen (Aint Kern as my country boy Jaidan calls her) had made before she was born. Under the afghan is a Chicago Cubs blanket my friend Mo bought us. My apologies to my Cards-fans family.
3) Isn't that ginormous Dora the scariest thing EVER? It even has a little patch of belly showing where here shirt doesn't meet her shorts.
4) I tried to strategically place toys and the bed so that stains on the carpet don't show. MY CHILDREN ARE DISGUSTING. Oh my gawwww. I could not believe all the "ick" on the carpet.
5) The ceiling is that disgusting "popcorn" stuff. My boys enjoy using my vacuum attachments as microphones so when I was vacuuming earlier, I couldn't find them. So there's still popcorn pieces all over the floor. Fun.
I moved the sectional couch around to split the room into two areas. Here's what the toy room side looks like:
We don't have "real" toy boxes because, HOLY CRAP, have ya'll ever priced toy boxes? Also, the blinds are ripped to shreds because, apparently, having a child is just like having a hyper active little puppy dog.
Anyway, they play area isn't huge. Honestly, I would prefer if the toy room could be on the bedroom side and vice versa but it was easier for me to move the couch (to be completely honest, though, I would rather just torch that couch) in the direction I moved it in, splitting it the way it is. Also, I wanted Karis to be away from the window.
I'm not even 100% sure why I'm making a blog post about all this. I just feel so accomplished! Sure, we haven't done any of our normal learning activities for today. And, sure, I parked Kyan and Karis in front of Team Oomi Zoomi for a while so I could move furniture around. But, gosh darnit, Karis now (sorta) has her own room and both it and the toy room are CLEAN. Accomplished, ya'll.
Plus this is a whole lot better than my other idea of making a list of everything irritating me right now (the 20th Duggar baby, the Personhood ammendment in Mississippi, my middle child, my oldest child, 90% of the people in Memphis, my husbands ex-wife, my stepdaughter's school, and trying to figure out where to spend Thanksgiving/ Christmas . . . just to name a few).
