I think we may be crazy....

[Phoebe]

to try and let our 2 and 4 year old girls share a bedroom. We rationalized it for a couple different reasons, but the main one being it sucks whenever we try and travel and have the kids in the same room (which is pretty much where ever we go. We have been doing this for over a week now and they have yet to accomplish a full night together. We tried putting the younger one back in her crib and now I have moved on to keeping our older daughter up a little later and in our room with little success. It is going on 10pm and they are still upstairs screaming and laughing.

My patience is running thin, but I keep hoping the novelty wears off and it won't be a big deal anymore. Now they are out of bed. Wonderful! Please tell me I am not nuts! How much time should I give it to work? Do you all have any suggestions?

Jennifer

[BonBon]

I thought you were going to say that you were pregnant with #3.

My thoughts - and take them with a grain of salt because my two are so young - is that the novelty will wear off before long. When we switched Gavin to a toddler bed over the summer, he went nuts over the freedom. We would hear him playing with his toys in the middle of the night. It took a week or two for that behavior to extinguish itself. We just let him do his thing and waited it out. Now he goes to bed like a dream. I say "It's bedtime" and he goes up the stairs, into his room and climbs into bed. And that's it.

Hopefully, they will tire of it soon. My only suggestion is to try what we did and completely ignore it. :|

We do it with our boys (3 and 4). For some reason, bedtime has always been much easier than naptime. They take advantage of it at naptime and play and mess around unless I intervene (or sometimes take one of them into my room and lay down too). At bedtime they pretty much go to sleep. When we started it was more about keeping the little one in there - he'd try to get out of the room and Jacob would be sweet and reassuring. Now they love to sleep in the same room and go nutty when we say we're going to seperate them.

SueC may have some suggestions, although her kids are crazy-good when it's time to sleep.

[Phoebe]

I wish Dagny! We are going on 8 months here of TTC here!

Jennifer

[houseelf]

We use duck tape and a glue gun.

Just kidding.

I was worried about my kids sharing a room and it has turned out wonderfully. I have a fairly no-fuss bedtime routine and fairly regular schedule which we always follow. They're pretty tired when they hit the sack and my oldest sleeps through anything. Sometimes I hear the sweetest giggling between the two of them.

It takes awhile to establish, but room sharing can bring sweet rewards in the sibblings' relationship.

Kelly

[SueC]

We weren't sure how it was going to work, but it does. Ours girls have shared a room from the time Sydney was born. First they were in the tiny little space off of our bedroom, and then when Mitchell came along, they were moved to an actual bedroom. For some reason they have always gone to sleep without any trouble, and they don't usually talk or play once they've been tucked in (don't ask me why!).
If yours do continue to play you might try staggering their bedtimes a little bit.
Overall, I really like that they share a room--for one we don't have the space, and I think it forces them to cooperate. Now that they are 4 and 6, they sometimes wish for their own rooms, mainly because they are developing very different tastes, but I honestly think they would be lonely if we were to actually split them up. In fact, sometimes I find Sydney in Maya's bed after she has had a bad dream.
Good luck Jennifer! I bet if you give it some time, it'll work out just fine!