A Move for Angel

We have three hallways in our home.  The upstairs hallway leads back to two bedrooms and a bath.  Ditto the second hallway, only downstairs.  The third hallway is almost an afterthought, squeezing past the furnace room and leading to our second kitchen and the storage room.  The skinny hallway widens at the end, just enough to accommodate a dresser, little shelves, and a toddler bed.  This is our Angel's room.  I have mentioned its itty-bitty-ness here and here.  The hallway begins about two inches from the right of this picture, and the room extends a foot or two to the left, and abut the same behind me as I took this shot.  Cozy, indeed.

The kitchen next to her room has been remodeled (um, we had some carpet installed over the old linoleum, took out the stove and the fridge, but left all the cabinets and the sink).  OK, maybe not remodeled, but sort of changed, a little bit.  Enough to use it as a bedroom, anyway.  Ben started out there, and after the last change-up, Alec has been the possessor of the kitchen-bedroom-that-I-get-all-to-myself.

Now that Alec has moved away to college, Angel gets lonely.  She's the only one in her hallway, and the other bedrooms are very far away, or at least it feels that way.  She doesn't like being by herself in her room.  As a result, she doesn't stay in her bed.  If it were just a struggle t get her to stay in her bed long enough to fall asleep, this would be a much shorter story.  <sorry>

No, she gets up, lonely, and wanders about the house in the middle of the night, as well.  We have found her curled up at the bottom of the stairs, sprawled across the couches upstairs, draped over the arms of the easy chair in front of the fireplace, on the floor next to my bed, on her mattress that she dragged out to the rec room, in her brothers' bedrooms, and anywhere else a little girl might like to sleep.  Except in her bed, in her bedroom.

It is unnerving to get up in the middle of the night, throw your exhausted legs over the edge of the bed... and step on a person.  Just saying.

The thought of Angel's midnight meanders makes me more than a little nervous.  What if she falls?  What if she gets into dangerous things?  What if she gets stuck somewhere?  What if she goes outside?  She is very adept at opening the outside doors and equally sneaky.  This arrangement is not working for The Worrier.

I think our best solution is to move Trent's office downstairs into the old kitchen, and let Angel have a bedroom upstairs.  His current office is the smallest real room in the house, so it would work wonderfully for one little girl.  She would be closer to Mom, Dad, and the twins, and not feel so alone.  AND she would be close enough for Super-Mom Radar to hear when she gets up.  I hope.

A side-benefit would be that Trent's office would be more quiet, and a little further away from the little ones who like to scream and bang on Daddy's door during work hours.  And Trent can get a drink of water whenever he wants one.  Bonus!

Did I just hear someone rolling their eyes about me always having to move everything around?  Come closer, my dear.  We have boxes for you to carry downstairs!