To My Brother, Whom I Slept With

The other day the boys WOULD NOT STOP POKING AND PICKING ON EACH OTHER. I finally said, "Okay, if you can't get enough of touching each other, you are sleeping together to-night!" (Insert lightning and thunder clap.)

By bedtime I forgot, but after everyone was all settled for the night Melanie (little mother) reminded me. "Maaaaaaa-ooooom!" (you know, that two toned "I'm tattle-telling-about-something" Mom?) "Aren't the boys supposed to sleep together tonight?" Grumble, grumble, growl. "Okay boys, Melanie is right."

So Sammy sidled into Adam's bottom bunk and they cozied in with a head at each end. I was very surprised how little I heard from them when I left the room. Thought it would be something like unto Bill Cosby's "To My Brother Russell, Whom I Slept With," but it was surprisingly quiet. (If you haven't heard that Cosby bit and you live close, come borrow our copy. If not, find a copy.)

Morning breaks, not a complaint at all.

A few days later they decided for fun to sleep together on Sammy's top bunk. I didn't realize or I would have put a stop to it - visions of one kicking the other off the bed in the middle of the night and all that. Again, quiet boys, though Sammy said Adam kept kicking him all night long. This coming from the king of climbing into bed next to mom and kicking HER all night.

Why beds, really? A few months back I knew something had to happen with the boys' room but didn't know what. I tossed around just mattresses they could lean up against the wall in the morning, or no beds no mattresses just sleeping bags. They thought both were cool, but we ended up getting hand-me-down bunkbeds with bookshelves on each end that my brothers slept on when they were kids. The boys think they are ultra sweet because they can pile all their stuff at each end to play with when they are supposed to be sleeping. It allowed us to move a big bookshelf out of their room, so that solved at least part of the space problem.

Sammy was quite the bed escape artist when he was a baby. I guess he has always really needed me at night, because that lasted till about a year ago. I don't remember how old he was when he learned to kick his leg back and hoist himself up enough to climb out of his crib, but we attempted to foil his plans by swapping the crib for the playpen. This added a few inches height to his cage, and few days of me going to him instead of him coming to me. Or maybe it was hours? Either way, it wasn't long before he figured out that the same trick would work to get him out of the playpen. When we realized we had been beaten by a less than 1 year old, the crib mattress just went on the floor. I remember one friend telling me she had mentioned it to one of her family members as a, "See we're not as radical as they are" type of statement. I still wonder why putting my child to sleep in the playpen or on a mattress on the floor is so strange.

I found it incredibly refreshing, like another family thought it was okay to "break the rules," to hear about a family that lived in a 3 bedroom home with their seven children - mom and dad in one bedroom, two girls and the baby boy in another, and four boys in the other. She said her husband built a triple bunkbed and two of the boys shared the bottom. Cool. I don't understand why some families think it's such a great thing to split up all their children into separate bedrooms. I bet those boys have stories and stories to share about their brothers, whom they slept with.

(By the way, when I thought of triple bunkbeds I thought of one on top of the other and didn't realize there were other really cool options for triple bunks!)