Separate Rooms

We live in a three bedroom apartment. One of the two kids bedrooms is small, so we have always used that as a toy room and Danielle and Victoria share the larger bedroom.

But Danielle is 10. She’s been lobbying for her own room for a while. It’s time. But the thing about a toy room is that you can accumulate a lot of stuff. We have high ceilings so there’s basically crap stacked 10 feet high. So we knew that doing the split would involve getting rid of a bunch of stuff.

Last weekend was the time. The mission for Saturday:

• Pull everything out of both rooms
• Repaint the toy room and touch up the paint in the other room
• Move Tori’s bed and some furniture into her new bedroom (second child gets the small room, live is not fair)
• Throw out as much junk as possible

Sunday was the “figure out what stuff is going in what room” day.

My wife went on a throwing out rampage. She went through every toy in the place. I lost count of the garbage bags. The girls have actually been pretty good about it. They are both excited about having their own rooms.

We weren’t totally sure how Tori would handle sleeping by herself. The first night she came to get me. “Papi, I had a bad dream”. This line is generally a fib, but on her first night in her own room I indulged her and stayed with her for a bit. Sunday night she was a champ, and Monday morning the first thing she did at school was tell her teacher she has her own room.

It was an Advil kind of weekend for me and my wife, but definitely worth it.