sleeping like queens

My two year old, Spaghetti, is not what I would call a good sleeper. Compared to her sister, Meatball, who has slept like an angel (on time and through the night) since birth, getting Spaghetti to sleep (and stay asleep has always been challenging. So when it was time for Spaghetti to make the transition to a toddler bed a couple months ago, she wouldn't have it.

My husband, Pretty Pants and I had the normal bedtime routine down: bath, story, prayer, song and a soothing sound machine. Even with all our efforts, she would still creep out of bed and try to sneak herself into her play things in the living room as if we wouldn't notice her. Since we were always in the living room after we put her to bed, we tried a different tactic and went to our bedroom instead in the hopes that Spaghetti would think everyone was sleeping too. This plan had a different success than we had expected. After a few hours of hiding out in our bedroom, my husband and I checked Spaghetti's room only to find she wasn't there! Instead, we found our girls, squished together on Meatball's twin sized bed sound asleep. All of a sudden, Spaghetti made a new bedtime routine: bath, story, prayer, song, soothing sound machine, sneak into my sister's bed.

After a few weeks of "sneaking around" my husband and I decided, why not just have them share a bed? It took us some time to deliberate over this matter. We considered their age gap (Meatball, 8; Spaghetti, 2) Would this be appropriate? Would they disrupt each other's sleep? I even asked my mother, the Colonel, only to get the 7-of-us-had-to-sleep-in-one-room-in-the-Philippines story on repeat. Then we asked Meatball if she thought it was okay and we knew she had mixed emotions about it: for one, she didn't know if she wanted to sleep with her sister but then again it was better than sleeping by herself, so she agreed. We couldn't afford to buy another bed but we did have a daybed with a trundle that the Colonel had given us for our spare bedroom. Luckily for us, we were able to convert the two twins we had to a king sized bed.

For a good two months, the transition worked out perfectly. For the girls, it was like a mini-slumber party every night before they went to bed. For my husband and I we were able to get an hour of our relaxation time back. We decided to check in with Meatball every six months or so to see if she was still okay with the sleeping arrangements. But at the same time, enforcing our parental authority that this is what they had to do. Lola, their grandmother, had to do it in the Philippines growing up, so why can't they? After two blissful months of more rest for everyone, Spaghetti went back to taking about an hour to settle down and sleep. Sometimes she still wakes up in the middle of the night, in which case either Pretty Pants or I or both of us can now lie down next to her and her snoring sister on their big king bed where we can all sleep like royalty.