Mom Blog and Baby Blog | Baby Bunching

baby bunches bunking up - how to handle sharing rooms

When my Bunch was very young, we had the luxury of separate bedrooms for each baby and this was a LIFESAVER in the early days.  But once their younger brother came along, they were forced to bunk together due to a shortage of bedrooms.  We've moved three times in the three years since The Caboose was born (long story) and each time, the bedroom configurations have necessitated room sharing, but the roommate configurations have actually shifted due to a variety of factors (ages, sleep schedules, child's propensity to goof off and rile his roommate, etc.).

We're now in what we hope will be our "forever" (or at least long-time) house and while we have the space for each boy to have his own room, we opted to reclaim our study/office and our Bunch is back to bunking together.  My guess is in a few months, The Caboose will realize he's being cheated out of bedtime shenanigans with brothers and the eldest will be sick of his little brothers in his stuff, and we'll play musical beds once again.  But 2 of the 3 will always be roommates.  

Now, room sharing with bigger kids is one thing, but room sharing with babies and toddlers and all of their various special sleep needs is a whole 'nother ball of wax.  I will admit that the only time we shared rooms in the early years was when we were forced to while traveling (and even then, we would literally stick a pack-and-play in the bathroom to ensure that each baby had their own separate 4 walls).  But lots of moms do it and make it work.  Here are a few tips we've picked up over the years for roommates of all ages.

• Always put your two best sleepers together OR the ones that are on the closest sleep schedules (dictated by nap or school schedules, usually), to minimize the accidental wake-up calls.
• If you've got babies/toddlers rooming together, get a white noise machine so one doesn't wake the other with crying.  Many little ones tend to sleep like logs - once they're down.  It's getting them down that's the tricky part...
• Speaking of that, stagger bedtimes and get the easiest or youngest child settled first (depending on the temperments of your kiddos).  Get one out like a light, crank up the white noise, and slide the other in.
• Daytime is a little harder because it tends to be light out, which encourages goofing off.  Darken as much as you can with darkening shades and stagger nap times like bedtime.  If all else fails, consider letting the oldest child nap somewhere else - either in mom and dad's bed or a pack-and-play or in a baby-proofed room with a baby gate across the door.  Too-few bedrooms mandates flexibility on everyone's part, including mom.
• If you've got more than two kids, be flexible on configurations.  Depending on ages and genders, while your first instinct may be to put all older kids in one room or all girls in one room, that may not actually be what makes the most sense.  And as kids get older and sleep habits/needs change, consider revisiting roommate arrangements - they're not set in stone forever.
• Finally, be patient.  Even if you have superstar sleepers, introducing a change in any routine is going to involve patience.  But keep in mind that kids have shared rooms since the beginning of time, and many of them are closer for it!  They'll survive and you will, too!

Q/A: baby gear essentials: avoiding big gear in a small house

Today's Q/A comes from Beth on our Facebook page.

Q:  My husband and I are adopting three boys, a 3-year old and two 18-month old twins.  We are currently childless so this is a HUGE new adventure for us.  Any suggestions on what you've done that works well?  I would also appreciate knowing what doesn't work.  I would also be interested in knowing what type of baby gear works best in a small house with lots of kids.

A:  First of all, WOW and congrats!  Nothing we can tell you is going to prepare you for how much your world will be rocked - and how much you will absolutely love it!  The blog and the Facebook pages are chock-full of do's and don'ts from seasoned Bunchers, so it's worth taking the time to scroll back through the years and load up on information.

To skip ahead to part 3 of your question, you're actually in luck.  Seven years and multiple children into parenting in *very* small houses (Cara holds the record currently, with three children and 1,400 square feet), we can both say that we know quite a bit about parenting in limited space.  The good news is that with your youngest boys being 18-months old, you can bypass some of the stuff we are tempted to get with newborns and infants (swings, Jumperoos, high chairs, etc.).  

In lieu of highchairs, get booster seats strapped onto regular old dining room chairs.  There are any number of hard plastic boosters with trays and straps that are portable and travel to restaurants, Grandma's, etc. easily (your wee ones are probably old enough to even do away with the the tray and pull right up to the table).  For bigger kids, we love soft boosters.   This will allow your oldest to climb up and down independently without you having to strap in/out while your hands are full with the little ones.  

For a bunch of kids this size, a "nice to have" if you have a little corner is a children's table and chairs - both for eating as well as for arts and crafts.  My all-time FAVORITE is Ikea's Mammut line.  Hideously colorful? Yes.  But oh, so convenient.  Lightweight and easy to move/pack/store away when grown ups come for dinner.  Waterproof so you can hose it down in the backyard.  Compact so you can throw it in the back of your van and take it to a friend's house when extra seating for children is needed.   These must be the reasons that everyone we know has this set.

As a fellow mom of all boys, I can tell you that our train table gets major mileage.  But for other families it might be a workbench or a play kitchen.  Depending on your space/configuration, consider limiting them to one "big" toy (or if they MUST have several, buy them secondhand so you don't care if they get weatherized and toss them in the backyard so the kids can play there).

The most important piece of big equipment you need, HANDS DOWN, is a stroller.  With this many small boys running in different directions, you need a way to keep them tethered down on occasion, for their own safety.  We're thinking your best bet is the Joovy Big Caboose (a Sit-and-Stand with double seats and a standing board).  We *think* that this may be superior to the Double Graco Sit-N-Stand, which we're not sure can accommodate two kids sitting AND one standing.  Readers, please chime in if you know.  Biggest cons to these strollers are they're bulky (need a good-sized trunk) and can be heavy/unwieldy at times, but it is SO WORTH IT to know that you can have everyone strapped down at once, should the occasion/need arise.  

And, of course, the cribs.  You are right on the borderline of being able to bypass cribs if you don't have them already.  A fully baby-proofed room with regular beds and a gate across the door that keeps them from wandering the house could possibly do the trick.  However, if they are used to sleeping in cribs, you may want to keep them in cribs since they are already making a big transition to a new home - I would feel that out with the current caregiver.  Skip the changing table altogether (18 months is right around the age where you have to start wrestling them to the ground to change diapers, anyway).

What have we missed, readers?  

a buncher's work is never done

Checking household chores off the list is never an easy feat for a Baby Buncher, but have you noticed that there are some chores that just seem IMPOSSIBLE thanks to your Bunch?  For me, it was vacuuming and putting away laundry.  

The nap trap made it almost impossible for me to vacuum - ever.  Either the kids were awake and underfoot so I couldn't vacuum or they were asleep and I couldn't vacuum for fear of waking one of them and losing precious "me" time (which I almost always used to do the chores I couldn't complete while they were awake). 

Ditto with getting clothes put away.  I could wash, dry and fold periodically throughout the day, but the only time I could ever seem to get things put away was during nap time.  Only I couldn't - because kids were sleeping in all rooms containing dressers.  For this reason, I managed to accumulate 3 laundry baskets perpetually filled with clean, folded clothes that just got shifted from the laundry room to the master bedroom to the living room to the dining room and straight to the kids' bodies, but never to their actual dressers or closets. I used to feel pretty bad about this until I talked to a Baby Bunching friend who told me that the youngest of her Bunch (at a little over a year) had never actually slept in her crib because they used it as the family laundry basket for clean, unfolded baby clothes.

As with many things Baby Bunching, time heals all wounds.  Now that I just have a baby and not a bunch of them, the clothes problem is solved because I put everyone's clothes except the baby's away during nap time and then put his away when I change his diaper after nap.  In fact, I'm getting ready to toss two of the laundry baskets just so I'm not ever tempted to get into a vicious failure-to-put-away cycle again.

Vacuuming still sucks because I can't do it during nap time, but when I do squeeze it in while the Bigs are at school, there's only one toddler to prevent from getting Hooverized instead of a toddler and a crawler and that helps.  That and the fact that we got hardwoods on the downstairs level so there's one less floor to vacuum.

Baby Bunching wants to know - what's your perpetually unfinished household business thanks to your Bunch? And more importantly, got any suggestions for other Bunchers on how to resolve theirs?

help for hire

Recently, as we were getting our house ready to put on the market, my husband and I were struggling with what basic home improvements to tackle ourselves and what we should pay someone else to do.  Hubs, God love him, has many talents but handiness is not one of them, so it was clear that any major fix-it jobs should be parceled out. We really struggled with the painting, because any painting that had already been done, we did ourselves (BEFORE we had kids or when grandparents were visiting to help with the kids). It was really frustrating to us to have to pay someone to do work that we knew we could do ourselves.  Of course, we couldn't do it with three kids hanging off the side, so if we did it ourselves we'd have to pay a sitter to look after them while we did it.  Talk about no-win situation.

In the end we went with a hybrid, hiring painters to do difficult areas and making touch-ups ourselves.  It took so much time and energy that in the end I wish we'd just hired them to do it all.

Ditto with our yard service. When we moved into our home, the homeowners association mandated fees to pay a neighborhood yard service.  We grumbled, knowing that we were perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.  Three kids later, I'm happy someone else does it because otherwise we'd be living in a jungle.

We've struggled with other opportunities to outsource over the years and I've gradually come to terms with the drycleaning bills and the housekeeper (who comes twice a month and is something we added when I started working part-time). I tried working with minimal childcare, but it's impossible for my job so I adore my babysitter that takes such great care of my kids so I can work.  In my next house, I've learned that I need to keep a handyman on speed dial so that ten years worth of minor repairs such as falling towel racks don't pile up on us.

In the constant battle of time vs. money and with many small children in the mix, Baby Bunching wants to know - what outsourcing have you found to be most valuable in helping you get it all done?

baby bunchers on the move--step 1: getting your house ready to show

There are many things in this world that suck, and I figure that moving has to be near the top of  the list.  Moving with your Baby Bunch has almost certainly got to be in the top 3.  Life is hard enough in the early years of Bunching - the last thing you need to throw into the mix is ANOTHER major life change. 

Linda is a seasoned mover who relocated several times, including internationally, within the first 5 years of Baby Bunching.  I personally have never moved with children, but we have mentally revisited the idea of moving every year since our oldest arrived and we have watched our starter home groaning under the weight of our expanding brood.  Each year, the very IDEA of moving with my kids was enough to convince me that it was worth staying put at any cost. 

But the moment of truth has finally arrived.  The home that we never intended to have children in is now one bedroom short of enough to house our three kids that arrived in rapid succession.  The one-car garage isn't big enough to hold all of our strollers, bikes and scooters, more less a car (forget about the minivan).  The backyard isn't fenced, the street is too busy, the neighborhood school isn't very good - I could go on and on with the reasons why this house isn't working anymore.  

So for the past month we have been killing ourselves to get it into tip-top condition, while our Bunch and the Caboose tag along behind us, undoing our progress.  I kid you not when I say that our painters painted the foyer and less than two hours later, the Caboose ran a toy along the wall and scraped it up.  Getting it ready to put the house on the market was almost impossible.  Keeping it clean enough to show will be a Sisyphean challenge.  

Fortunately, we already had a spring break trip planned and the realtor convinced us to extend it by a few days so she could have ten consecutive kid-free days to host a realtor caravan, an open house, and show it.  It's pretty sad when even your realtor wants your kids to go away.  

For now, I'm clinging to a few key pieces of advice  for survival that other friends in the same boat have offered. They include:

• Plan to become a nomad. Spend as little time as possible at home.  Call in all favors from your friends for playdates, tackle that long list of errands you've had for months, spend a lot of time at the playground, drive around and check out neighborhoods for your new house.  On the bright side, since your house is spic and span, you now have time to do all that stuff outside the house that you never seem to get around to.
• Eat somewhere else - a restaurant, the park, a friend's house, your car - doesn't matter as long as it's not your kitchen.
• Have a one big basket or container for when you have just a moment's notice for a showing.  Run around and throw everything in it and find a well-disguised hiding place for it.

And a few I've learned on my own, the hard way:

• Decide what size storage unit you need to move some stuff out so it looks less cluttered.  Whatever size you decide on, double it and get that size.
• Make a master list of everything that needs to get done.  In the beginning, when you are just purging/moving to storage, it won't feel like you're making a lot of progress. Write it all down (broken down into specific steps) and cross off as you get it done - it will keep you motivated.
• When getting your house ready to put on the market, always get the windows washed last.
• Do not host a birthday party for your child during this timeframe and if you do, make it "no gifts".  Birthday parties generate a lot of clutter that will replace all that stuff you worked so hard to move out.
• Move to paper plates and plastic utensils for just a few months. The environment will give you a free pass.
• Scope out all the cheap/free meals in town. We hit two different Moe's for kids eat free on two different nights of the week and we've learned that WalMart rotisserie chicken is cheaper than Costco's.  But Costco still has the cheapest pizza and hot dogs, hands down.  
• And finally, you will be tempted to work yourself to the bone on the house, but remember that you still have kids.  Ours noticeably suffered as we poured so much energy into the house while they played off to the side.  Enlisting the help of babysitters, friends, and family will help keep them occupied when you can't.

Tell me what I'm missing.  Because I need all the help I can get.