Room-sharing for littles / how would you plan space if you were me?

[Lucky Recardito]

TL/DR: Tell me about your experiences and best practices for room-sharing for very young kiddos, and brainstorm about how we can make the best use of the space in our home.

The Set-Up: DH and I currently have 1 toddler, with a new baby on the way in the spring. The age gap will be almost exactly 2 years -- so we'll have a 2yo and a newborn. Older child is a boy; younger child is a girl. Our home has 2 bedrooms upstairs (right now one is the master; the other is the toddler's room), and 1 bedroom downstairs (right off the dining room/main living space; currently set up as a guest room). Each floor has one full bath (no bedrooms are directly connected to a bathroom). Overall plan is to have the kids share the upstairs bedroom for a TBD number of years while they are young, and then divvy them up somewhere around adolescence, leaving 1 upstairs and moving the other downstairs to the room off the dining room.

Questions that I'd love input on:

• How have folks managed room-sharing for the first year or so of new-baby time? Our toddler is a great sleeper (7pm-6am, no disruptions), so I don't want to bork it by giving him a newborn in his space. Do I wait until the newbie is sleeping fully through the night? One wake-up? (It took our older child ~4-5 months to get to 1 wakeup, and he really started sleeping all the way through around 11 months. No idea how child #2 will do.)
• At what age should I be expecting to split the kids up? Anyone have experiences to share?
• In the near-term, we're thinking of re-working the downstairs bedroom into more of a combo playroom/office/temporary newborn sleeping space, with probably a Murphy bed so it still works for guests (right now it just has a standard double bed in there, which pretty much takes up the whole room so it's mostly unused space). But long-term, I suspect this becomes a teenager's bedroom... is it a bad idea to put in a Murphy bed (couple thousand $$ probably), or will a tween think that's cool/fine?

Some other notes and ramblings:

• The main reason we don't want to use the downstairs bedroom as a child's room in the near-term is because it's right off our main living space -- and right now, it's really nice to put the kid to bed upstairs at 7 PM, then have a couple of hours of adult time with the TV (or visitors, if it wasn't COVID), and not worry about noise. I worry less about this once a kid is older and doesn't go to bed so early.
• I've considered using the downstairs bedroom as the master and just giving each kid a solo room upstairs, but (a) the downstairs bedroom is really only big enough for a double bed; we currently have a king and I love it and never want to go back, and (b) I'd prefer to keep the best bedroom in the house for us (the parents) and not give the kids alllll the good space.
• When our son was born, I learned that I hated having him in our bedroom, which is how we started. Everything was much better once we kicked him out into his own room. In a perfect world, I wouldn't ever put a newborn in our room again... but I think that's probably our only option for the first weeks/months (though I'm not opposed to using the downstairs bedroom as a temporary newborn sleeping spaces as well). But "keep new baby in the master for a full year" is low on my list of fun-sounding options.
• All of this is complicated a bit more by COVID -- both DH and I WFH currently, and expect that to be true through next summer or fall. Which means that DH will be WFH while I'm on maternity leave, and I'll be WFH while he's on paternity leave (we'll swap)... this isn't a permanent problem I don't think, as we both expect to return to office life at some point, but it does mean we'll be extra on top of each other for a while (toddler will presumably continue attending daycare unless there's another major shutdown).

Curious to hear other folks' input/experiences. I've been combing my memory for other families I knew as children looking for ideas and examples of flexible space usage, but weirdly all I remember is houses with 4 bedrooms upstairs, and no room-sharing children (pretty homogeneous middle/upper-middle-class suburb) -- but I want to make our space work for us. I think we have enough room... but we'll need to be thoughtful about how we use it. Thanks in advance!

[Sibley]

Combing my memories....

My sister and I had separate rooms. We need space from each other to get along well.

I had a friend who shared, 4 girls, 2 rooms, but they were all older. I know the family had been in the house since they were all little and thus sharing would have had to happen.

Babysat for a family with 5, 2 youngest shared (boy and girl, about 2 and 5) and had bunk beds. Bedtime was a nightmare anyway and sharing had nothing to do with it. The parents having more kids than they could handle, the last being a last ditch effort to save the marriage, then having a nasty divorce was a big factor. Don't do that.

If your older is a good sleeper, they may learn to sleep through baby. Or at least go back to sleep. I suspect that's generally what happens.

[chemistk]

We have 3 kids - 5, 3, 1, - all boys.

We really screwed ourselves over by co-sleeping with our first two when they were infants, so I can't directly advise on the 2-child circumstance.

That being said, the older two (surprise, surprise) absolutely loathed the crib. Our oldest was sleeping in a 'normal' bed at 16 months, and our middle was in a 'normal' bed by 18 months - both in the same room. They got along well enough and for a while even slept together in the same bed to keep each other company. They both sleep in their own beds now and don't cuddle with each other anymore but love being in the same room together.

Our youngest, though, spent his first ~6 months in our room. One of the things we really couldn't plan for is how fond the older boys were going to be towards their brother, and how sensitive they would be to the inevitable midnight wakeups. So, to mitigate any negative things (i.e. oldest trying to fetch the infant out of the crib) we kept the baby in our room until we were all well-accustomed to the new person and the change in the sleep schedules. I think we were already so used to having kids in bed that having the baby in a crib in the room was a direct upgrade over the other kids, and much easier to handle.

At 6 months we moved him into his own room (adjacent to the older boys' [we have 3 bedrooms on the same level]) and he's done remarkably well but more importantly the screaming really didn't wake the older kids once we moved him and there have never been any extraction attempts.

So, if I were you, I'd probably keep the baby in your room for a while because who knows how they'll be. My wife and I will always sacrifice a few hours of our own sleep if it means our kids get a full night - there's literally nothing worse than a sleep deprived, indecisive, whiny, hell-child toddler.

Once the baby is in a good sleep rhythm - ideally sleeping through the night - and you can confirm that the older kid isn't going to try and 1) extract the baby, 2) try to quiet the baby, or 3) climb into the baby's crib, I think you'd be free and clear to have them sleep in the same room.

I 1000% agree with you that the downstairs room should NOT be the kids' room. Perhaps you could look into some minor renovations to get a king to fit in there in case the cohabitation of the kids is not a pleasant experience. But honestly - kids are adaptable and can learn to love something even if they abhor it at first. 

[ysette9]

My daughters started sharing a room when #2 was around 1 and was sleeping through the night. Looking back on it I probably could have moved her earlier as they mostly don’t wake each other up when crying, but #1 had been such an epically poor sleeper as a baby and toddler that I was too emotionally scarred to try. They mostly love sharing and keep each other up giggling and talking and playing. :)

I have no intention of separating them at this point, even if we moved to a place with enough room.

I do struggle similarly to you with what to do with our #3. He is a year now and sleeping ok, but the girls’ room isn’t big enough to put his bed in. I can’t sleep, period, in the same room as the baby so he shares with my husband in the main bedroom and I take the guest/office two floors down. Not ideal anyway you look at it but we are stuck for the moment with the layout of this rental.

[20957]

I feel like a 2-3 year old is often flexible enough to take a baby moving in. Our twins moved in with the older one when they were 6?8? months and she was almost 3. It was all fine, she slept through most of their antics. And many of a 3 year old's toys are sturdy enough for a 1 year old to mess with. It's a good age gap, imo.

 We are currently debating what to do with the new baby too- she is a year old and has just finished a period of horrific non-sleep so I feel like we could inflict her on the others. But in the new house there are 2 kid bedrooms, one for twins and one for almost 7 year old. It seems most fair and works best space-wise to put her with oldest, but she has many tiny chokeable, breakable toys in her room, and she has said she'd rather not. So we are in limbo in the mini-nursery that would rather become a master bath.

[yachi]

I think we generally kept babies in our bedroom until age 3 to 6 months, then:
1 Child: own room, parents in another
2 Children: each own room (both girls) moved computer desk into family room
3 Children: moved girls in together, boy into separate room
4 Children (added a girl): scratched our head on this one for a while, and ended up putting a door on the family room, getting bunk beds so both older girls could have space, moved toddler girl into her own room

The children bedrooms are only 10x10, but he former family room was 10x20 or so.

[rockstache]

My plan is to keep baby with us until it sleeps through the night and then boot it to the toddler’s room. We plan to have three bedrooms but one will remain office/guest space and I don’t think kids need their own room until they’re much older if ever. I don’t actually know a single kid that I grew up with that ever had their own room. It builds character.