Monday Memories - Good Night

Cali, Atlas, me, Zeph, Ande

It might have been funny if it hadn't been for Harry Potter.

My cousin had nine children without enough bedrooms.  One child needed some privacy and space so they created a little fort-bedroom for him by making a bed in the food storage room over barrels of wheat.  I thought their space solution was ingenious.  I knew I would have liked sleeping in a fort as a kid.

Several years later we were in the same dilemma.  Our kids needed space.  I suggested we turn a closet into Ande's bedroom; after all a covered wagon box isn't much bigger than a closet and Laura Ingalls Wilder's whole family lived in one for months.  So we folded Ande's clothes, organized her belongings into little baskets on the shelf, and put several blankets on the floor to make a soft bed, it was almost like the princess and the pea.  We even closed it off with a shower curtain of her choosing -- Winnie the Pooh.

We moved Ande into the closet and she happily slept there for months.  Well, at least I thought she was happy in her hole.   One day we had the missionaries over for dinner.  Cali was embarrassed that they might find out we kept a child in the closet and dismantled Ande's room in ten minutes.  If Ande hadn't been ashamed of her living space before, she certainly was when she saw Cali wanted it kept secret.  Suddenly the solution was no longer ingenious, it was idiotic.

When we found out Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia kept Harry in a closet it made it worse. "Really," we heard people wonder, "what kind of a person keeps a kid in a closet?" And even though Ande had had a real bed in a real room for a few years by then, we still couldn't talk about her old sleeping arrangements.  It made Ande mad that Cali hadn't shared her bedroom to begin with.  It made Abe mad because Ande was mad.  It made Cali mad that I even thought of the idea.  It made Ty mad because I tried to make him feel guilty for requesting space in the first place.  Calvin was the only one that wasn't mad and that was because he didn't even remember Ande slept in the closet.  I'm telling you, it was a sore spot for a few years, a real blight on the family memory.

But as you can see in the picture above that we took yesterday, that's all behind us now.  Cali has forgiven me and Ande has forgiven Cali.  And wouldn't you know, all of our kids like sharing bedrooms now that they're married.

It's as Ma Ingalls always said, "All's well that ends well."