I don’t know about your children but our girls are always asking to sleep somewhere other than in their own beds. For instance, they want to sleep in the fort they just built or on pillows in the living room. It doesn’t usually work out but they ask all the time anyway. Their most frequent request is to sleep on the air mattress we set up for guests in the playroom.
We have set up the “guest bed” numerous times for visitors since we moved here. Each time, the girls have asked to sleep on it but it never seems to be a good time. It’s either a school night when they really need their sleep or one of the girls is sick and it wouldn’t be fair.
My dad was here last week for a couple of nights so the bed was still in the playroom. It had been taken apart and deflated but I hadn’t gotten it back in the closet yet. Last Saturday Robert and I devised a plan. While the girls were in the bathtub, Robert inflated the bed and I put on the sheets. You should have heard the squeals of delight when we told them to get their pillows and head for the playroom. It was deafening.
They got in the bed and immediately started calling out the complaints. “Laura won’t stop tickling me!” “Hattie is putting her feet on everybody!” “MOM – I’m trying to sleep and THEY are talking!” This lasted about 20 minutes. We didn’t pay much attention. Within a half an hour, all three were off to dream land. I checked in on them when we went to bed and they were downright angelic.
It took about 10 minutes of manual labor to get the bed set up and it was more than worth it. You would have thought we had given these girls a shopping spree at Toys R Us. They thought it was fabulous. It wasn’t a fancy hotel or friends house…it was just something a little different. It doesn’t take much to make these girls happy. Last weekend they got to stay outside all day, eat dinner on the deck and sleep on the guest bed. Score one for a perfect weekend!
