Blending pains...

Whenever you add new family members to your existing family, there are always pains associated with the addition. By pains, I don't mean physical pains. Rather, the pains of having to change what you do each day and re-establish your routines, etc...

My daughter is 5 years old and it has been just the two of us for as long as she can remember. She was 3 when we moved into our new house and I got in the bad habit of letting her sleep in my bed at night. At first it was one night a week, usually on the weekend.

Then storm season rolled in and it turned into an almost every night situation. There are perks to having your kid right there when you have to make a run for the closet, but this was not good for either of us as she ended up getting to bed later than she should and I got kicked, hit or snored at on a nightly basis.

Rudy and I started dating over a year ago. When things started to get more serious between us, I thought about our future and the hopes that someday we would get married. I was pretty sure he wouldn't want to share the bed with my daughter every night. So, I started talking to my daughter about how 5 year old children sleep in their own beds. After her fifth birthday, she began sleeping in her own bed. We did really well the first couple of weeks until we had a long series of night time storms. Our progress was completely destroyed.

After that, we did battle almost nightly about why she should sleep in her own room. It is hard to tell that pitiful, sweet face that she has to stay upstairs, all alone, in Texas no less while I am in California. She said that to me one night. It was so funny. "Mom, when I am in my room upstairs, it feels like I am up here in Texas while you are WAY down there in California."

She really does love having Rudy around. She is happy to see him when he gets home from work. She likes to play in the yard with him. All around she is very glad that we are getting married. What she doesn't like is that she has to sleep in her own bed. Last night she asked if she could come down in the middle of the night and get me if there was an emergency. I told her yes, but decided we better go over just what exactly constitutes an emergency (after all, this is NOT my first rodeo).

We decided that the loss of a limb or excessive bleeding definitely qualified as an emergency. After that, she got a little creative and we ended up with a long list of things that are and things that are not an emergency. At the end, she was okay with staying in her bed. She managed to make it through till morning and when I came to wake her in her own bed this morning, I congratulated her for keeping all of her limbs and not bleeding excessively throughout the night.

For some reason she didn't think that was funny...

In the end, I know that we will all figure out a new routine and how to sleep in our own beds. I did reassure her that if it was storming really badly I would come get her and she could still sleep with us.