Moving baby into big sister's room - how to do so with 10 month old and 5 yr old?

[citymama]

Right now, DD2's crib is in our tiny room, and so are all her clothes. It is ridiculously tight! Her toys and books are in the living room. DD1 and her enormous amount of toys, books and clothes have a room all to themselves (the master BR!).

We're moving next month into our new home (finally! :yay:). While it is a 3 BR, we would like the girls to share a room and use the third bedroom as a study/guest room (DH and I both work from home and absolutely need the space). There is a large family room where they could have a section as a play area.

Now, here's the question: how does it work to have a 10 month old and almost 5 yr old share a room? DD1 is very excited about it, or so she claims. I think they will enjoy sharing a room but I am concerned about the following:
a) neither of them sleeps through the night. It drives us nuts. DD2 is easier because she nurses and falls back asleep right away. We have no idea why DD1 wakes up but we are way too tired to figure it out. On the one hand, this could be great as DD1 is always saying she is scared to sleep alone. On the other, they could set each other off with their waking up. I figure this will stabilize over time and surely can't be worse than the current situation. In fact, sharing might help (wishful thinking?).
b) Bedtime: DD2 goes to sleep at 7.30 or 8. She nurses down to sleep in a quiet, darkened room. Older DD is a night owl and takes FOREVER to fall asleep. I swear, sometimes it is 11 before she is asleep. She talks, chatters, tells herself stories, gets up to pee, asks for water, asks for cuddles. The only way this is going to work is if we can find a way for them to go to sleep at about the same time - maybe 8.30 pm, which I can't quite imagine. Or is there another way to do this?
c) DD's toys and choking hazards. My plan is to make sure there are no small toys, beads, jewelry etc allowed in the girls' room - all that is in a designated part of the play area, or maybe temporarily put away in boxes until DD2 stops mouthing everything.

I assume I'm not the only one who has tried to get a 10-12 month old to share a room with an older sibling. If you did it, how did you make the transition, and deal with the issues I've flagged above (differing bedtimes, waking each other up, safety for the baby)? I would love any advice. I know if I was reading this, I'd probably say - you're not ready for this yet - and in truth, we would wait a few more months till maybe 15 months if we had a choice. I am concerned that if we move to the new place and DD1 stakes out her space, it will be hard to later have DD2 intrude on that turf and displace DD's toys and play space.

TIA for your advice, and thanks for reading through this!

[goldenpig]

No advice necessarily, but I'll be watching this thread because so far 11 month old DS has refused to sleep in his crib (we have her old crib plus her new twin bed in the same room and are hoping they'll share). I think pretty soon I am going to move 3.5 year old DD out of her room for a week and try again to do CIO with him (we tried once before a couple months ago and only lasted 3 days before we gave up and he's still in our bed).

Does your older one still nap? I find that if DD naps she goes to bed way late, like 9 or 10. But if she skips a nap, she gets cranky at night and has tantrums. So we're still dealing with trying to figure it out. But maybe your DD is old enough not to nap and to go to bed earlier. I would try to get them to sleep at the same time if possible (right now we're at 8:30 for both of them most nights, and DS nurses to sleep and wakes up 1-2x/night). They wake up between 6-7 am. DD does still wake all of us up by crying in the middle of the night and when she gets up early :( so I don't think it matters if they're in the same room or not.

I have only stuffed animals and books in their shared room. Chokable toys I try to keep in bins up on higher shelves in their playroom (I have the 8-cube bookcases from Land of Nod).

I agree, I would set up their shared space as soon as you move in. Good luck! Congrats on the new home!

[KrisM]

DD moved into DS1's room, by his request, when she was 20 months or so. DS1 was almost 4 years old. He had only slept through the night a handful of times. By the end of a week, he was sleeping through. I really believe, he wanted company. I'd bet he woke up and realized DD was there and just went to sleep, rather than coming for us.

It worked really well for us for over a year. Then, they wanted to be on their own again, so we moved her out and to her own room.

[MamaMolly]

Hmmm. We have a 4.5 yo and a 10 mo old, and I'm scared to put the baby in with her sister because I worry about her sister being 'helpful' and trying to pick up the baby or 'comfort' the baby with a thick blanket, pillow or some other horror. :eek:

Have you read the Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child book? I read it in an effort to get DD2 out of our bed, and it had a lot of good adivce about my DD1, too. Your DD1 might be like mine, missing out on a lot of sleep. Once they get overly tired it can be so hard to get them to relax and rest. If I miss out on the 6-7pm window of sleep opportunity we are royally screwed until 10 -11pm. Now I've become a bit of a bear about it, but we have really seen an improvement in her ability to STTN. We also bought her the Mobi Tykelight because she was scared to be alone and had the room light on all night. The Mobi isn't too bright at all, and she quickly falls asleep looking at the rainbow colors shifting.

I hate having my living room look like TRU, but I prefer that to having toys in the bedroom We put books, dolls and stuffed animals in their rooms, and that's it as far as toys go. Of course, Lula being 4.5 she can make a toy out of a bucket of hair bows, a kleenex box and her socks IYKWIM, but for the most part bedrooms are for sleep.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe if DD1 got to bed even earlier, then perhaps she'd sleep more, and then you could put the baby in her crib in there once DD1 is asleep.

I'm really concerned about the chokable toys, so I'll start another thread about that because I have no idea how to fix that one! Lula wasn't a 'mouthy' kid, seriously she could play with my coin purse at 2 years old and not put anything in her mouth ever. Dolly eats bugs, hair, crumbs, paper, fuzz and God only knows what else she finds on the floor in her mouth all day long. It has me frazzled a little.

[94bruin]

I don't really have any good advice for your specific situation since we waited until DD2 was just shy of 2, wanting to wait until her sleeping habits stabilized. We tried several times before, but DD2 would wake up DD1 and DD1 would complain about being tired the next day.

Maybe when you move, you can make DD1's sleeping room really boring and put interesting things in DD2's room (or the room you'd like them to share.)

Actually, despite DD1's original room to be chock full or toys & books, she begged us constantly to sleep with DD2. Maybe it was the novelty of sleeping in a different room that interested her, as she has since mentioned that she'd like to go back to her old room (although I vetoed that idea, and she hasn't brought up since.)

I think you can still move kids together even if they've been sleeping apart initially. We moved into our current home right before DD2 was born and DD1 was 3.5. DD1 had her own room for almost 2 years. (and the years before in the old house.)