Living in a Shoe

We live in a small, 2 bedroom house with 3 kids. It's a cute-as-a-button, little pre-war cottage, but ever so tiny. Storage is minimal as I suspect people just didn't have a lot of stuff in the "olden days."

I try not to whine about it too much because I realize that there are generations of women in the world who have lived and continue to live with multiple children and family members in small houses, shacks and mud huts. Certainly if they could make it work, we can make do with our current situation. Still, most of the time, I feel like the lady who lives in the shoe who had too many children...yada yada

We are planning on selling the house and buying a larger house. That has been established. We are in the process of preparing the house for sale, which is a long and arduous process with my working outside the home half the time and having 3 chilren running around "the shoe" the other half of the time. All that said, it will happen, it has to happen, it's just going to take some time.

We moved the twins (from our bedroom) into Sofia's room about 2 months ago. At first, it seemed to be working. They went to bed early, she went to bed about an hour later, sometimes waking one of them, but nothing too bad. Now, they don't seem to want to go down and by the time I put her in there, all 3 of them are up to all sorts of shenanigans until sometimes 9 p.m. We're used to a 7 p.m. bedtime around here, that's how we *roll* so this just doesn't fly. In an effort to prevent me from going off the rails of the crazy train, we've been trying to strategize a way to make this work.

As a last ditch effort, I officially moved Sofia's toddler bed into a corner of our bedroom yesterday. This is by no means an ideal situation, but my options are limited. Sofia was thrilled, of course, thinking it was some special slumber party escapade with Mommy. Other than Mango laying claim to her bed out as his new lounging pad and a warm little body creeping on top of me at 5 a.m., the first night went pretty well. The boys fell asleep early (thanks to limiting them to one nap) and woke up late, most likely due to some accumulated sleep deprivation.

Anyhooties - until we sell the house and purchase a bigger one, this is how it will have to be.

As a sidenote, my boss did drag me to look at 3 houses yesterday, the twins in tow. The first was huge but would need at least $200k of work (not happening), the second one was perfect except for a huge, empty pool in the yard. It would need to be filled in and from what I hear, this can be quite expensive. The third house was home in probate and had what can only be described as "old person smell." From what I could see, a little old lady had lived there quite peacefully. It was all original but boy, that little old lady was neat as a pin, she was.