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The Closed Door Phase

© Carrie Webbenhurst

We have entered a new phase in our household, which I call lovingly "The Closed Door" phase. We have been leaning toward this phase for about a year now, but it is now officially here.

You see, for almost the last thirteen years, my boys have shared a bedroom. Since they have entered puberty, they have felt the need for more privacy--hence the closed door to their bedroom. That all changed this last weekend. They now have their own bedrooms. We haven't seen them since Saturday--okay. that's an exaggeration, but it sure seems that way.

When the boys were babies, it was out of necessity and convenience that they shared a room. At first they shared a room with Steve and me; we were lucky to have a huge bedroom at the time. This was the convenience part; their cribs were placed right behind our beds. This way when they woke up in the middle of the night, we were right there to grab them, change them, feed them and get them back to sleep quickly and then get ourselves back to sleep. After a few months of this, we moved them to the guest room--this was the necessity part; we only had one other bedroom in our house.

I won't say this bedroom sharing was a great idea, because when they were sharing the only other bedroom, they constantly woke each other up. We ended up, for a while, each taking a baby into a different bed with us, just so we could all get some sleep. I already covered this topic of having your baby sleep with you. I say do it if you need to.

When we moved to Washington, we had an extra bedroom all of a sudden. So, we separated the boys and we all slept straight through the night. Finally, when the boys were around eight months old, they slept through the whole night. I firmly believe it was because they didn't wake each other up. For six months we had them in separate rooms and then we moved to a new house.

For another six months, we had them in separate bedrooms again. Then we decided we needed the third bedroom upstairs to make into a den/TV room for us. So, we moved the boys back together and they had been roommates up until this weekend.

Last summer, we talked about moving Logan out of that bedroom and into the den. The problem was what was in the bedroom. The third bedroom was a combination of rooms: Steve's clothes closet, catch-all room and hockey gear room. It took us awhile to decide just how we would go about moving all the stuff out of that room so Logan could have it all to himself. And it took until this summer to complete all the phases.

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