Well folks, it worked. Or anyway, it sorta worked. There were kinks, and things got hinky there when Sam realized we were really taking his bed away, but our two little sugarplums are nestled right now in their big new beds.

Things got off to a rough start, because the shape of our house made it impossible to drag the beds in ahead of time, meaning we had to plan to deliver them as a middle-of-the-day-work-in-progress surprise. Only when we woke up, it was shiver in my bones pouring rain. Queue Ten Thousand Maniacs. Scott checked the radar, identified a brief hole when we could drag everything in from the shed, and as soon as the predicted letup began, we raced inside with a thousand parts.

I got these beds used off of Craig’s list. But the guy said they were practically unused, because he and his wife purchased them to make their kids room in their tiny army housing bedrooms, only to find out that their kids didn’t want them. Or rather, that their kids only slept in the bottom bunks that came with the units, while the top bunks were taking up badly needed space. So when he said ‘only used five times’, he meant it. The sticky tags were still in place, people. Melted there, from sitting in his shed for a couple of months, in fact.

I could have left them on until we could go get some Goo Gone, but they were bugging me, and they had to be removed.

Also, as we knew, they came with some assembly required.

We didn’t tell the kids what we were doing, listening as Caroline guessed “a place to put a TV in my room?”, “A really weird new desk”, and “my own hole like Ringo has in Yellow Submarine, only this one is square”. (She was referring to the space above the desk, which is something of a hollowed out rectangle until the bed gets into place.)

Although we had already told them that they each got one, as soon as they realized what was happening in Caroline’s room, that was the only place in the house they wanted to be. (Even before the side rails were in place.)

After we finished Sis’s, we moved on to Sam’s.

 

 

 

He walked into his bedroom once, turned around and left without a word, then told Caroline, “Go look what they are doing to my bed.” Naturally, when she checked, nothing seemed out of place to her, since we had just done the same thing in her room. Clearly, she’s dealing with this change better.

So while I did this,

Sam went away, found some scissors and gouged open a glass piggy-bank present one styrofoam bead at a time.

 “I only wanted to paint it,” he said. Instead, he got to spend an hour cleaning up the mess before I’d even allow him a dustbuster.

After that, it was still another hour before he was allowed to touch a brush or googly eye.

After we finished building, Sam refused to come in. He said, “No thanks. We can just share Sis’s new flying bed.” However, and I have no idea why this worked, when we found out he was mad because he still had his old mattress (I had thought I might be able to give him Caroline’s boxspring and half mentioned it before realizing that doing so would put his mattress even with the rails instead of below them), I told him the history of every mattress in the house and he was mollified.

So his first foray up his own ladder came at bedtime, when I had been hoping he would climb up sooner. Still, he stayed with only a minimal of extra-hug-n-kiss demands.

In contrast, Caroline practically flew up that ladder. She couldn’t wait to bed down in her own personal flight center.

Overall, it appears the swap-out experiment was a success,  Scott and I are drinking a bottle of celebratory Riesling now, as we clean up the disaster that is Christmas at our house. I notice that this bottle is about the same size as the one we had the night of the Polar Express disaster. We have been working on the same bottle for nearly six hours now and should finish up right at bedtime. That bottle at the hotel lasted only a third of that time. If that. And most of it went in me. *hic*. No wonder I fell asleep before I could post that evening. (I rarely drink and so have low alcohol tolerance to begin with. But I theeeenk that the phrase ‘really drunk’ has application in this situation)

Christmas has ended on a gentle note for us, and I hope for you as well.

Cheers,

Jessie

About jesterqueen: Jessie Powell is the Jester Queen. She likes to tell you about her dog, her kids, her fiction, and her blog, but not necessarily in that order.