Fitting 4 boys into a 12x9ft bedroom!

A spare moment! :) And blogger is letting me upload pictures again, so I am back to post what I SHOULD have posted here last May! These are the photos of the boys' bedroom when we moved Benjamin into a "big boy" bed, moving his cot out of the room and purchasing a second-hand cabin bed to match the bunk bed we already had, for Matthew to sleep on, and for Benjamin to sleep beneath on a mattress on the floor. He was 22 months old back then, and ready to move out of his cot. A floor bed is always best, we've found, as there is nowhere for them to fall.

This room used to be "our" bedroom, as it's the bigger one, and we had a big kingsize bed. Once Samuel was on the way, we swapped the bedrooms around. We got rid of the kingsize bed and purchased a beautiful wooden sleigh bed in "small double" (3/4 size) at eBay for £30 or thereabouts! :) That's my bed with the baby. Neil sleeps on a futon bed on the floor of the boys' bedroom. He gets way more sleep that way when I am attending to a young baby during the night, putting the lamp on, changing nappies, breastfeeding, burping, etc, etc - all that GORGEOUS gorgeous stuff that comes with a tiny baby! I mean that so very much! It's such a gorgeous wonderful time! I can't believe it used to be sort of tiresome on the first two babies, and to some degree on the third baby. I have cherished it to pieces with babies 4 and 5, and am actually LONGING for it before baby #6 is even here, despite still waking at night every single night with baby (well, toddler!) #5. I don't know what the transformation has been. All I know is that I adore it, it's so wonderful. I feel so blessed that I could pop with joy when I'm up at night cradling a sweet tiny person and meeting those raw needs that they have early on. Love it so much! :)

Anyway, Neil obviously sleeps better OUT of the room where all that goes on! ;) Also he does any wakings that the older boys have, once I am doing the newborn/young baby wakings, so being in there to start with makes that a lot easier for him, and he is much less disturbed than if he was getting up and going back and forth if someone has a bad dream or falls out of bed. They don't wake him much. Benjamin is the most likely to wake out of all of them. They sleep through like logs, even with someone screaming and crying in there! ;)

This weekend, we will be moving Samuel in with them! *sniffle* It is sooooo bittersweet for me! He has never left my side at night - never slept for even a minute in the cot. ALL his naps and night sleeps have been in my bed. Only Arthur had done that before Samuel. All the others had slept in the cot (and Benjamin slept in the Amby hammock until he was 9 months old as well) to varying degrees. They've ALL partially co-slept though, for ease of night nursing. Anyway, Samuel is the most delightful little bed-fellow! He is a sweet darling, and settles pretty easily. He still wakes at night to breastfeed, but I know he isn't really in NEED of milk at night so hopefully he will night-wean easily with the move. I will miss him SO much! :( That's the bitter part. The sweet part is that my sleep is really bad at the moment, and I feel sure that it will improve once I have the bed to myself for these last uncomfortable weeks of pregnancy. I am 35 weeks pregnant now!

So, we have changed their bedroom around completely in the last month, in preparation for Samuel moving in there. We bought some Ikea storage furniture at eBay - can't believe how much money we have saved over the years buying second-hand at eBay, and the stuff we are buying looks like an original matching set when we've put all the second-hand bits together! :) I'm very picky and careful about what I buy, and sit in wait for many months if I have to, so the end result is nice to look at and live in, and ended up costing a fraction of the new price! Love that! :)

In order to get onto showing you the "new" bedroom for 5 little boys, I need to first post about when we set it up for the FOUR little boys last year. Samuel was 5 months old - it's not even a year ago but it seems a lot longer because it was a whole "cycle" ago in terms of adding babies! ;)

Here's the cabin bed we bought at eBay. It had stickers on the side still, but otherwise in perfect condition with two mattresses in great condition, one of which we used on top and the other underneath. This is how it looked set up ready for Benjamin and Matthew, before bedtime on their first night there:



Panning round to the other end of the room where their big bunk bed is:



Big bunks! Arthur sleeps on top, and Nathan on the bottom. Nathey slept on his toddler bed until these photos, but when we bought the cabin bed, we dismantled the toddler bed and stored it away, and Nathan moved into a normal sized bed for the first time. He wasn't happy about it at first, but he loves his bed now. His dream is to have a top bunk bed one day! Pretty sure we can make that a reality in time to come! :)



Here's my tiny little Samuel on Benjamin's new bed! He was squirming to get out of my arms so I put him under there and he looked soooooooo happy about it! I remember thinking that one day HE might be the little one in that bed, but I sort of shook the thought out of my head in disbelief, because it seemed impossible to consider with him being so tiny and just "my babyyyyy!!!" at that time! Now it IS his turn, and not even a year later! Can't believe it....



A blurry photo of the boys exploring the view from the cabin bed with great excitement! We had just let them in the room for the first time to see the changes we'd made, and they were BEYOND excited! Benjamin had trouble on the ladder, because it is straight up/down, unlike the main bunks which have a slanted ladder (easier to climb safely). He has NO such trouble now! ;) I was so excited to find a second-hand bed that was an exact match for our bunks! It's a Thuka bed, and the previous owners had even chosen the same colours as we did, for the safety rails and glow-in-the-dark ladder treads! Perfect.



The new bed plan opened the room up much more, and it was oddly more spacious than it had ever been, even though it was housing four children and a Daddy! Neil usually put his futon alongside Benjamin's bed for ease of the (many) night wakings that he dealt with in the early months in there. It's easily rolled away in the day so makes for extra floor space. The only wall I didn't photograph was the one the door opens into, where I was standing. There's a big double chest of drawers with six deep drawers in it, and those drawers house all the boys' clothing. Originally it held only Matthew and Arthur's clothing, and they had 3 drawers each, when we first bought it (incidentally for £50 on eBay!!! Wish I had a photo to show you, but I'll get one of the "new" layout this weekend and you can see it then). Then when Nathan's clothes got added, we gave them 2 drawers each. When Benjamin moved into the bedroom I gave them a drawer each, and the top two drawers across the chest were pyjama drawers - each boy had a half drawer for pyjamas. This made it much easier to grab their PJs at bedtime. This is the system we still have in place, and it works well. By the time Benjamin's clothes needed to go in there, it meant I had to take a look at what clothes I was storing and start to cull the stuff they had. They always had too many clothes, because I'm addicted to eBay! ;) It was a very helpful exercise in decluttering, and part of the much needed work I had to get my head round, managing a small home with a large family. They now have about 5 outfits each, and about the same for summer outfits. Their summer outfits are stored away when it's not summer, and winter outfits get stored away in the summer. If we get to the stage where their clothes don't fit in their drawer, it's time to get rid of some clothes. It has made the most incredible impact on the amount of laundry I have to do, and apart from the fact that it seems like they wear their clothes out quicker (wearing them more frequently), it makes no difference at all to the amount of clothing they always have available to wear. Fantastic! :)

So there it is! I am not sure what to do yet about Samuel's clothes. I have been drastically sorting and culling baby clothes in all sizes (several hugely packed black sacks to charity recently) so that all the clothes we have for each baby size fits into one plastic crate box. Again, if it doesn't all fit, I have to take a deep breath and go through it all again to find something that I can bear to part with, until it all fits. Pregnancy is the only time to do these things - I'm in a relentless nesting mood and ruthless when it comes to decluttering, and I don't have the "awwww!!!" issues that come with not currently being pregnant and being overly emotionally attached to tiny clothing that I might or might not get to use again! ;)

I will try to get plenty of photos when we put Samuel in the boys' room. I am excited about it! We have moved the beds together in an L-shape so they look like staggered height quad bunks. The boys LOVE it! It has opened the floor up EVEN MORE, which we didn't think about beforehand so it was a very pleasant surprise! Once again, the room has never been so spacious, and yet we're adding ANOTHER person to the room, lol! Plan A is that Samuel will sleep on the floor bed that Benjamin has been using, and all the boys will stay in their usual beds. Nathan and Benjamin will top-and-tail in Nathan's bed, because it's an extra long European size bed and those two boys take up less than half the length each when they are sleeping at night. They are also the two boys who roam about their bed the LEAST during sleep, out of all the boys. They are excited about sharing. I never would have thought of top-and-tailing them until I read it as a tip from another large family, as a space saving solution when they are little. While we are still in this tiny house, they will definitely be little enough so it should work well. It's such a bonus not to have to add another bed-space to the room! Plan B is for if Benjamin causes havoc in that bed, or something! ;) In that case we will set up the toddler bed again, which should fit on the "door" wall and still leave a good amount of floor space.

Right now they play in there a lot, as we've added "big boy" toys in the Ikea unit we bought. There's more floor space than there has ever been in either of our bedrooms (since we moved here in 2001!!), and three of them can play happily in there building Lego or doing floor puzzles for hours.

I will stop now and get some photos taken asap, to post soon! Just so glad to have finally got around to documenting the changes in the bedroom! :)