Aiden has never been a great sleeper. He didn't sleep through the night until he was 8 or 9 months old and even then it wasn't consistent. To this day he still has a hard time through the night. Anyway, we realized that probably part of the problem was that in our house there is only one bedroom on the main floor (ours) and the rest are in the basement. Once he was out of his crib he pretty much never stayed in his own room down there. He'd come rushing up in the middle of the night breathing so hard and nearly tripping up the stairs to get to us. We tried every method possible and nothing was working. Sometime around Dec 2011 we had some cousins come to stay with us and since they would be in the other rooms in the basement we decided we'd just let Aiden come sleep on our floor so we wouldn't be up and down the stairs with him all night. During the nights they were here we realized that Aiden was having nightmares. He would moan and cry and occasionally yell out but be completely unwakeable until he'd suddenly wake up and be so out of it and scared. It was awful and made us feel even more guilty for banishing him to the basement and trying to force him to stay there. We decided to keep him in our room for a while. Well it lasted a year. I'm sure people would say we're crazy but my justification was that he wasn't sleeping WITH us in our bed, just on the floor on his own little bed.
Well a year later I decided we should remodel one of the rooms for him. I had hoped by this point we'd have a baby on the way and that it might be a girl so we could leave "the pink room" pink, so we considered painting the tan nursery, but since it has all the cabinets already built in we decided it would be better to keep in the baby room and use the storage for diapers and all that stuff. Plus I secretly hoped that if we changed the pink room then Murphy's Law would kick in and we'd suddenly be pregnant with a baby girl haha!
We let Aiden help with every step hoping that if it was a huge exciting deal he'd be more likely to stay permanently down there and feel pride since he helped with his very own room.
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| Painting the trim so carefully |
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| Helping Dad find where he can put the nails (even though the railing was done already) |
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| Concentrating so hard on the border! I love that little tongue. |
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| Finishing touches |
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| We have had so many people tell us that the ceiling surely was white but the solid pink of the rest of the room just reflected onto it making it look pink as well. This is my proof that the ENTIRE room was solid pink!! |
The colors didn't turn out quite like I imagined and hoped they would so when it was still wet I was pretty upset that it was going to be so ugly, but once it was dry and the tape was gone and everything was put back together I was happy with it. Aiden loved it too and the vibrant colors definitely fit his personality!
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| Even though the Mario sheets don't match, perfectly, they were definitely an added incentive for Aiden to sleep in his new big boy bed! |
Now that's it's been a whole year I can say it has been a success! Aiden sleeps in his room no problem every night. Phew! It took a while to transition though. We worried that he'd still be scared suddenly moving down by himself so for a while we slept on the floor in his old room across the hall for a few weeks. When he was fine with that we moved down the hall and around the corner to the bed in the Mario room for a few more weeks. In Feb or March or whenever cousin Allyse's mission farewell was, Uncle Clint, Aunt Stacia, and cousins Taygen and Jensen came to stay at our house for the weekend. We explained to Aiden that they'd be in the Mario room so we were going back up to our own room. He was totally fine while they were there so we decided to see what would happen if we stayed upstairs after they left and we haven't had a problem since! YAY! Now I just want to paint the last bedroom downstairs and our master bedroom. Someday....
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