American in Spain

A Room of Her Own

November 16, 2009

Not counting my office, our house has two bedrooms, one large, and the other freakin' enormous. Ever since moving in, we've been sleeping in the smaller of the two for several reasons, the main ones being the gorgeous view and the fact that it's exterior, with no neighbors' balconies nearby. When it became clear that we'd be having a third resident in our house, our irrational greed took over and we both agreed that, "There's no way we're giving the baby the biggest room in the house! Over our dead bodies!" Actually the whole house would be hers since she's the sole heir. So we moved into the bigger bedroom, set up the crib in there with the intention of banishing her to the smaller bedroom when the time came, and we lived like this for eight months. Until... Recently, we have found ourselves locked in a groggy battle of determination with our horrible noisemaker lovely daughter. It's the age old gotta-be-fought-eventually battle of "No, I will not pick you up out of the crib no matter how much you scream!" The other night, I swear on the Large Hadron Colider, that she screamed nonstop for ninety minutes straight (from 2:00 to 3:30 AM, in case you're wondering). With each breath taking less than a second, there was never a continuous second of silence.

[At this point my readers are divided into those that have kids and are nodding and rubbing their temples in empathy and those without kids who are wondering what kind of horrible neglecting deadbeats we are.]

If you offered me a million dollars to make continuous noise for an hour and a half without a whole second of silence, I don't think I could do it. That's the kind of lungs and resolve we're up against on the other side of the battlefield. If she puts half of the willpower she's shown in the crib towards her education, she'll have a handful of PhDs in no time!

That's right about the point when it was decided that our time sleeping in the same room as that wretched beast sweet baby had come to a close. We can be aware that she's crying and ignore her just fine from the other bedroom without it sounding like a fire engine is about to run over us.

So we rolled her into the smaller bedroom and kept the big cavernous one for ourselves, right? Well, no. It turns out that all the same reasons that made us choose the smaller bedroom in the first place were still perfectly valid, so we're leaving Princess Bullhorn in the big room where she can continue her acoustics experiments. I moved the beds on Sunday, so we've only had one night with the change, and it was very, very peaceful. She babbled for about ten minutes at 4:00 AM, and we heard her...at just the right volume.