We are living in a 3 bedroom townhouse, with the 3 bedrooms and full bath upstairs, the living area and half bath on the main floor. and an unfinished basement. Currently we have the master bedroom set up as the main day home play room, the other 2 bedrooms are set up for my daughter's bedroom and the nap time room, with the adult bedroom in the basement. After a while of having the set up like this, I have realized that hauling kids up and down the stairs 5-6 times every day for meals and outside time is completely impractical, not to mention unsafe when I have 2 under 2 who don't know how to do stairs on their own. So I decided that I would set up our kids picnic table upstairs, and make sure to do lots of slow cooker meals, and casseroles that I would be able to grab from the kitchen and bring upstairs to the kids to eat. Well, in comes my home visitor from the agency and she tells me that is a big fat no-no to leave the kids alone even for 2 minutes to grab a meal and bring upstairs. My husband and I sat down to brainstorm again, and came up with the idea to get a loft bed, or a futon for our 6 year old to sleep on, and convert her room into a kitchen for the day home. As I thought about that idea I thought of how awesome it would be to have the day home area completely separate from the rest of the family home. It would feel great to go upstairs to work, and come back downstairs to my home, so I got excited thinking about getting a mini fridge, and putting a toaster oven and slow cooker on nice shelves upstairs, until I realized that my daughter is starting school in one week.
Now I'm not sure what to do. As you may remember from some of my earlier posts I am open late hours, and will most likely have children here until past 9 pm. With my daughter needing to be up at 7:30 am, she is going to need to be asleep by 8:30 at the latest in order to continue getting the sleep that she needs, that means getting her into bed by 8:00. If any if you are parents then I'm sure you know that getting a kid to sleep with other children awake somewhere else in the house is no easy task, and getting a kid to sleep when there are other children just across the hall is damn near impossible. So I am lost and do not know what to do. I've come up with some ideas, but all of them have some pretty big negatives to them, so I'm enlisting your help in coming up with a solution that will work.
Here are the options I have thought of so far, and a few of the negative points associated with them:
- Option 1: Day home stays completely upstairs, my 6 year old stays sleeping upstairs, she may or may not get enough sleep at night, making her grouchy, irritable, and miserable, consequently making the entire family grouchy, irritable and miserable.
- Option 2: Move the day home space to the main floor, and convert the master bedroom into a living room. The two big cons of this are that we would need to get new furniture as our current couches would not fit upstairs, and we would have to watch TV at very low levels so as not to wake up the kids sleeping beside us.
- Option 3: Move the living room into the basement, day home goes on the main floor, all family bedrooms go upstairs. The big cons of this scenario are again, needing to get new furniture as our current couches would not fit through the doorway to the basement, and of course having the main living room in a dark unfinished basement is not very appealing.
