We bought loft beds for the kids this summer, after checking and re-checking and triple-checking that loft beds were what they really wanted. YES, they declared most emphatically, YES WE WANT THEM. And we thought they would be great, as they would provide so much more space in the bedrooms by lifting the beds up off the floor.
Martin loves his. It’s a little fort, a magic treehouse, a hidey-hole and cozy nest where he can lie and read for hours until I come in and yell at him to put the book down, for godsake it’s after 11 and it’s a SCHOOL NIGHT YOUNG MAN.
Karin seemed to be quite happy with hers, too, until a few weeks ago, when out of the blue (for us anyway) she declaimed that she didn’t like it and wouldn’t sleep in it. Due to our rocky history with Karin’s sleeping habits this naturally got right up in my grill and pissed me off. “What?” I exclaimed, “What do you mean you don’t like it? You’ve been sleeping in it for MONTHS with no problem! What’s changed? Why don’t you like it now??” But she either couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate just what was wrong with the bed or why she had decided so stubbornly that no way, no how was she going to be continuing to make the climb up that ladder each evening.
“Fine,” I snapped. “You can sleep on the floor. I am NOT making up a bed for you or putting out the cot bed when you have a perfectly good bed right there.” In my head I was wailing, “But it’s a brand new bed! A perfectly good bed! A cozy treehouse of a bed! That we PAID GOOD MONEY FOR!!” She categorically refused and having known the stubborn rock-like obstinacy capacity of my daughter since she was but a wee thing I decided this was not a fight worth taking. If she didn’t want to sleep in the bed, she didn’t have to, but we were not buying another bed right now and I was not going to make any special concessions about sleeping arrangements. She could take her blanket and pillow and sleep on the damn floor, if she preferred.
After a couple of weeks of this, where she has alternated by sleeping in the bed and on the floor and twice, curled up in her very small armchair we are at a standstill in the struggle of wills. I suspect that the biggest reason why she has decided she doesn’t like the bed is because neither Anders nor I are disposed to climb up in it and lie down with her so that she can fall asleep, something she frequently demanded (and still tries for) when she had a regular bed and which we just as frequently and with much exasperation, refused to do, citing “big girl-hood” and “in a minute” and other wafflings which would get us out of spending an hour in a darkened bedroom every night when we had other things to be doing.
Don’t get me wrong: we sat with her a lot, but this has been going on since she was a baby, so we are understandably tired of it and feel she really ought to be past this stage by now.
Anyway, a friend of mine has a son around Martin’s age who has been contemplating getting one of these exact same loftbeds but who isn’t sure he will like it. I’ve offered to let them come over and try it out and pitched Martin to use his most persuasive arguments in favor of the bed, in the hopes that he will agree to trade with us. Keep your fingers crossed!
In other news, I’ve officially lost 13.1 kilos in total, to date. That’s just shy of 30 pounds. I’m quite pleased with myself for moving downward again after hitting an ugly plateau that lasted for MONTHS. I still have a long way to go, though. But still. Yay!
Big Bright Bundles of Belated Birthday Wishes to berchshill!