Sharing Bedrooms ~ Large Family Logistics

Sharing bedrooms can be a wonderful bonding experience for siblings, but for large families, the logistics can be a bit tricky.

Tricky, but not impossible!

We currently have seven children sharing two bedrooms.  We have one girl’s bedroom for our three girls (ages 14, 13, 3) and one boy’s bedroom for our 4 boys (ages 12, 10, 3, 17 months).  I have found that the actual number of children per room matters very little, especially if there is another play space in the home to keep toys.  Bunk beds can be built and arranged in such creative ways and bedrooms are primarily for sleeping, right?  So really no big deal, whether there are 2 siblings or 5 siblings to a room.

At our house the difficulty has come, not with the number of children per room, but with the combination of certain ages and stages.  For us, the hardest has been combining sleep-training toddlers with bigger kids.  Not always.  Some of my toddlers have been very sound sleepers, but when they aren’t, we’ve had problems such as these:

• older child sets an alarm to wake up early to start on schoolwork or chores = alarm wakes up toddler
• older child wakes early (as above) = lonely preschooler fusses because she’s not allowed to get out of bed yet
• preschooler wakes up with nightmare or to go potty = wakes up toddler
• toddler has regressed and has to cry it out a bit = wakes up big kids

These things are disruptive and super annoying.  I’m not actually writing this blog post because I have a solution to these problems.  I don’t!  We’ve managed in various ways, sometimes by providing weighted blankets, ear plugs, and sound machines, sometimes by moving big kids onto the basement couch for a week here, a month there, until we get past the difficult stage.  If we are ever able to add a nursery or large closet to our master bedroom, we will definitely do that, but for now, we make do.

It can be messy, but you know what?  These little ones are so worth the trouble and these stages pass pretty quickly!  We all have to learn to suffer a bit for each other, to move over, give up a comfort, or squeeze in a little tighter.  All of it grows our character and all of it is worth it.

So, while I don’t have a lot of answers for you, I do hope to encourage you to take a risk.  Trust the Lord, be creative, and patient.

I hope the pictures I’ve posted here of how we’ve organized our 7 children in 2 bedrooms will be helpful to you.  My husband built the bunk beds using Ana White’s design website.

Many blessings to those of you who feel led by the Lord to welcome more children into your home, even if it’s a bit snug!