Room for rent

So I did something today that in the long run isn't too terrible...I suppose, in the short term on the other hand?  At least for the next week or so...it might be uncomfortable. We will get back to that in a bit.

I'm not sure if this is something common to all of Sweden or if its just the islands way of being.  The homes here are generally smaller and have fewer rooms.  It is not uncommon for several siblings to share a common room with no real personal space.  Also, most homes have multiple entrances each leading to a different floor, often times the different floors can be rented out as apartments.   The house we are staying in has three floors.  A basement, middle floor and upper floor.

In past year we lived on the lower floor while my wife's mother lived in the middle floor, occasionally her brother or other visitors stay on the upper floor. Although the house is not large it allowed for more space.

This year my wife's mother has rented out the top floor to a local man who works for the island utility company...On an odd side thing, all of the utility workers seem to wear Capri Work pants.

For our first four weeks we had the run of the middle floor and the basement. Although we didn't use the middle floor much (See blog posting "in the house where we live").  For the last week or so the basement has been rented out to a family...So we have been confined to the middle floor.  In fact, all five of us are living in one room, its not terrible small, but it really doesn't matter...There are five of us after all.  For the most part it isn't too big of a deal. At home we have a family bedroom, and more common than not we co-sleep (the family all sleeping in one bed).

When Elsa was a baby...And I didn't realize how creepy I am. 

Although parents don't admit to it, co-sleeping happens about 70% of the time with infants and estimates for co-sleeping into the older ages go into the 30% range.  There are a number of benefits to co-sleeping and it is suggested that it is the normal state for human sleeping.  If you think about most social animals sleep in a giant pile.

http://thebabybond.com/Cosleeping&SIDSFactSheet.html

With the exception of sleeping, i hate being in the room...All of our stuff is also packed into the room, it also serves as my office, the kids playroom, our sitting room and our time-out room for the kids.

This transition/corralling has been hard on all of us.  First, we had to remember/learn which door to go through.  I would like to say this was a bigger problem for the kids...but I can't.  Next, we had to learn what is ok to do on the deck and what isn't.  (The deck we have is directly above the grill patio for the basement floor.)   The boys needed to learn its not ok to pee on the deck...I guess something young boys will do when on a deck...it only took one talk.

This morning it poured for a couple of hours, we have several containers and buckets on the deck.  Vincent wanted to see how much water one of these buckets holds...of course dumping it all over the people below...that was somewhat problematic.  The slats in the deck nice and widely spaced, so much of the water drained rapidly.

I discovered the spacing of the slats when I went down to see just how much water was spilled.  As I brushed water off of the tables and chairs, I looked up and could clearly see my son looking down at me...Which brings me back around to two days ago when I changed out of my bathing and roamed around on the porch in only a towel for a couple of hours...Don't want to think about the what the perspective of the house guests was...They leave in a week...until then I can avoid eye contact.

Playing on the deck...A much nicer image of deck life.