New beds have arrived and I'm starting to freak out about the arrival of baby three.
Things always happen in an awkward order and there is never enough time or energy to get everything tidied and straight. I'm trying to bear this in mind as I survey the chaos that seems to have extended into every room of the house and the series of things that need to happen before I 'organised' might be a word I can use again when referring to my house.
These are some of the bits of logic that have inspired the current upside down situation. New baby will need the cot at some point. Sally and Pip will need to share a bedroom at this same some point in the future, (Summer? ... When baby decides to sleep through the night? ... Next winter? ...Oh god will I have a nice baby that sleeps or a 'challenge' that likes to see how far mummy and daddy can cope with sleep deprivation?...) Sally and Pip will need bunkbeds. We do have four bedrooms upstairs, but I regard the spare room as a fairly necessary location that needs to be accessible at all times - if there is a child awake in the night only one parent needs to be involved in this unless it is a catastrophic emergency. I also don't want to have to move children around if my mother-in-law or a friend comes to stay the night. Oh, and if I give the children their own rooms each then their mess will be in all the rooms upstairs, all the time and I don't want to have to tidy it up - corral the children, corral the mess.
But what beds to buy and when? Pip has had his cot in the bed formulation for a few months. I can't remember exactly when, but it was the day after I turned around whilst making tea in the quiet of what I thought was a still sleeping house and enjoying the peace before the day began when a small person who ought not to have been able to escape his room said 'hello mummy' and I nearly poured scalding water on my foot. He hasn't outgrown the cot/bed yet, but seriously, it is such a pain to read him his bedtime stories in! So, a decision was reached. New beds for both children that can be both two singles and then stacked into bunks at some point! These arrived on Friday and Ed put them together yesterday.
Both kiddies look so small in their new beds! I'm not really sure why Sally looks so much smaller - its the same size as her old bed (which was also half of a bunk bed, but I think the other half of it didn't come back from Glasgow), but she clearly slept well in it. I can tell this because a) the grey circles under her eyes are gone this morning, and, b) when I went to check on her last night she was asleep where I'd left her rather than with the light on and all of her toys and blankets squashed in around her. Pip on the other hand looks teeny tiny. I snuck in and took this while he was having his nap - he must like his bed too as I didn't have to put him back in half a dozen times like normal. Plus the rail along the side (there is a second one for when it's the upper bunk) means he didn't fall out and I can do away with the bed guard which makes story time such a pain.
So, both children have their new beds. But, even once all the cardboard has been dealt with a massive game of musical furniture needs to be completed. We can't just lose the old bed as presumably the new baby will want a real bed in a couple of years. That mattress will have to go under the spare bed which is where I currently keep the spare duvets. New storage needs to be organised there. We've decided to put the cot back up in the spare room which means a bookshelf needs moving. The Moses basket is going to go next to me which means a chest of drawers needs to go downstairs where another bookshelf currently resides. That's two bookshelves worth of books that need new homes. A trip to IKEA is on the cards I feel, it's either that or I bin all of the CDs and DVDs which I'm sure Marie Kondo would encourage me to do, but I'm not sure I can quite bare to.
The baby isn't due for 6 weeks, but I have definitely reached the nesting/organising phase where you lie in bed awake for hours despite being exhausted wondering where everything is going to go and how the hell it is all going to get done. Six weeks seems like forever I'm trying to put my socks on, but its a scarily short time when you count the weekends and factor in all ther other crazy shit that is going on. Ed's got his day at the forge next week - best Christmas present from wife ever - which cuts next weekend a little short, and the dress rehearsal weekend for the show a couple of weeks after that. Of course there's nothing during the week like parents evenings or reports or just endless marking to worry about either... oh, or feeding the family or the laundry. A second count looks rather more like two full weekends and suddenly six weeks looks like no time at all and so much shit to do. And of course all of this is dependant on a well behaved baby that stays put until about when it is supposed to. In fact, it is such little time that I am newly motivated to go and work out where to put the spare duvets. Right now.
All the spare duvets are now labelled and in vaccum bags stacked in the spare wardrobe - and it now closes, which it hasn't in ages. Yay.