Ry's New Digs

After: Minecraft / Lego retreat

We've been working really hard on the room swap the last two weeks! It started with the inspiration for Ry's new room, picking out the colors, and ordering a new bed for him. Then the painting kicked into high gear. We said goodbye to the girls' old room...which was hard, but necessary. We disassembled their cribs and I found new homes for them where they will be well used and loved. Then we kept on painting. I had two friends visit during the past two weeks who lent a hand and great company during those long hours. Others advised on color selection and I'm so happy that I switched the shade of blue since the first was much too bright and pastel.

Before: The girls' room

Before: The girls' room

As always Ry and I had a lot of fun together. I taught him my painting techniques which were learned over many years and honed last year when I repainted the living room. He enjoyed doing measurements, rolling, and inspecting afterward (wearing his headlamp and using a magnifying glass) to find spots we had missed. He and his dad assembled the bed in one night.

Some of the special things we did were making a bookshelf and reading nook inside one of his closets and then freeing up his large bookshelf for lego car storage! That's one of the advantages of not caring about clothes and having a tiny wardrobe. His other closet is filled mostly with bins of legos. He doesn't even need a dresser so we put his socks and underwear into the bin sitting on top of Steve and Enderman's heads!

We still need a few finishing touches like getting a futon for all the friends that want to sleepover. And to summarize my dynamic with my son sometimes, when I recently confused Minecraft as being created by Lego, he looked at me as if I had grown a second head. I guess they are two totally separate things but he loves them both! He's slept in his new room the last two nights and mostly seems to enjoy having a place to get away from the girls so we're just relieved that the swap worked out well and that everyone has embraced the change! And I'm going to give myself a little break before really tackling the girls' room since I'm pretty tired!

An Amazing Collaborator

My son is often my collaborator, co-conspirator, and initiator of a lot of fun ideas. I'm so grateful to have him in my life. There were two fun examples from today. Last week I convinced him to stop by Safeway with me on the way home from school to get some grocery shopping done for a small dinner party I had on Friday night. We saw a rainbow cake mix and he suggested we bake a cake over the weekend. So we did it this morning! We both enjoyed mixing the six colors. The recipe gave VERY specific instructions on the number of drops of each color to add. Then I decided to also try fondant icing which I've been curious about for a long time. All 3 kids got involved in that. It was really fun to see how smoothly it went on the cake. But during our sniffing and tasting process throughout, I kept getting mixed feedback from them on whether it tasted more like clay or more like sugary icing! In the end we decided it was something in the middle. It looked better than it tasted for sure!

Sometime last week I also worked up the courage to suggest to Ry that he switch rooms with his sisters. His current room is quite a bit bigger and it just makes sense for the girls to eventually have the bigger room since they'll still share one. Ry already puts up with quite a lot from the girls everyday so I was worried about how he would take this suggestion. I offered that he could get a loft or bunk bed and we could redecorate his new room however he wanted. He wasn't exactly jumping up and down about the prospect but he was willing to do it. For whatever reason he said he really wanted to take his bookshelf with him. I love his adaptability! And he can make decisions quickly. I think these are the two attributes that make him a great collaborator with me. So since this discussion we've picked out a bunk bed with a futon on the bottom where we can all hang out and read. And we've agreed on the background colors for the walls which I'm almost 99% certain will end up with some sort of Minecraft scene in the foreground. We laid paint chips out at our lunch at Chipotle with friends today, lucked out on a 40% paint sale, and started painting the grass this afternoon. We both love the color. Being geeky we discussed what height would make most sense and prototyped a few different ones with tape before we got the brushes out. He also mentioned that he still liked the train scene I painted in his current room when he was 1 year old (which made me both happy and sad) and we wondered if the girls would opt for keeping it (which I highly doubt).

I am a little sad to be repainting the rooms and in some ways transitioning from their young childhoods. The next step will be getting rid of the cribs. And my son the pragmatist asked, "are you going to give those away or sell them?" He's always helping me think ahead to the next step!