Separation....Anxiety?

On my part, not theirs.  I thought they would HATE having their own rooms, the reason we were separating them to begin with - as punishment.  But as the weeks, and the naughtiness, wore on, it dawned on me that they were TRYING to get separated! 

They've been sleeping separately for naps since the fall.  The second room wasn't set up as anything, so it was just a mattress on the floor in a mostly empty room.  I erroneously thought that they would miss each other so much that they would shape up so they could be in each other's company again.  Boy, was I wrong!

After several weeks of all-out naughtiness at bedtime, I finally convinced Hubs that we needed to give M the second room, despite that it also needs to be a nursery in four months (GAH!!!!)  So, this weekend, we did it.  N has the old room and M has the "new" room.  Both rooms are mostly empty because they still screw around with everything in there, making them look sparse and bare. 

But they love it.  N still gives us a hard time when we put him down, but only for 5 minutes.  Without M, there's no one to entertain with all of his goofiness and he passes out pretty quickly.

M is a chatterbox and sings songs and reads books well into the night, probably too late.  But three nights in, I'm just happy he's staying in bed and not crawling the walls anymore - or bossing N around, telling him to do naughty things.  Sneaky.

I, on the other hand, am a tiny bit sad.  Weird, because I wasn't sad to see the breastfeeding go, cribs go, the highchairs go, the toddler beds (a bad idea) go when the big kid beds arrived.  But separating twin brothers?  It doesn't seem right.  We want them to be each other's best friends, inseparable buddies, so I'm just the tiniest bit sad that they are totally okay with having their own rooms at just 2 1/2.  I thought they'd share a room until the day one got married! 

On the other hand, I'm totally happy to report that the last 3 bedtimes have gone (mostly) well.  By that I mean the weeping an gnashing of teeth usually accompanied by bedtime is down to just minutes.  Who are those people who say bedtime is their favorite time of day with the kids?  The ones whose kids listen to stories quietly in laps, and drift off silently to sleep?  Does that really happen, because I'm thinking it's only in the movies.  Like love at first sight.  Everyone wants it to be true, but it's just not.

We will still have to figure out what to do with the bedrooms when Baby Three arrives, but that's so far in the future, I can barely conceive it.  We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  In the meantime, I'm praying for miraculous bedtime behavior so that we can "reward" them with moving back in together, and therefore giving the baby his own nursery.  

Here are two snaps taken with my iphone yesterday.  M "wanted to do a project," so I gave him the dyed noodles and some yarn.  The project lasted all of 5 minutes, but he was very serious about it while he did it!  The other is N, who found the baby sunglasses they refused to wear this summer or last, and LOVED them yesterday.  He wore them all day and night, as evidenced in this photo, where he's playing with Grandpa A's iphone.  You can tell it's dark because of the screen's light on his face!

Now that I've got that off my chest and I'm over the separation anxiety of bedrooms, I'll have you know that potty training officially starts on Thursday.  So you might not hear from me for awhile.  I'll be scrubbing the floors.