The Great Room Exchange

We are a big family by today's standards. There's six of us, and when we moved into our home, it had 3 bedrooms.  We knew we'd need to expand our house and luckily I have a handy husband who finished out our basement and our house became a 5 bedroom.  We have done lots of room exchanges since we moved in about 3 1/2 years ago.  Our "office" has been in 3 different rooms.  And each of the kids have been in 2-3 different rooms.  It's not that we like to rearrange and re-paint (Chris hates it...me, well I think it's fun!).  It's just that our needs keep changing. 

At one point we thought all the kids would eventually have their own room.  But the fact remains that we will always need some type of office.  Both of us do plenty of work from home and Chris has his schoolwork.  And all of my volunteer activities keep my house full of binders and boxes.  So Chris and I realized our kids would never all have their own room.  This left us with a dilemma.  Sam would naturally get his own room being the only boy, and Sophia had hers since she was the oldest.  That left Anna and Isabella sharing.  That's okay for now since neither one of them really would want to be alone, but eventually....they might.  So, what to do? 

Obviously the most natural idea would be to put them all together, right?!  We like the idea of the girls sharing a room.  The more they share space, the better they play together, and we hope, the closer they become as sisters.  That's the idea at least.  Plus there's a big value in learning to share everything!  So we put all three girls in one room after Christmas.  We figured they'd have a little harder time falling asleep, but that hasn't really been the case.  And it seems like they really are playing better together.  Sophia is naturally a loner so getting her to play more with her sisters has been great.  We keep telling them their sisters will always be their best friends...so here's hoping they believe us! 

We've even thought about knocking the wall down between the two bedrooms downstairs and giving them one large room - more like a sleeping porch I guess.  But we're going to wait and see how it goes.  That's a little permanent for a family that switches things up so much!  But I do think it's a little funny that this family of 6 is back where we started...in 3 bedrooms.