Monday, March 10, 2014

Bedlam v.2

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Owen had the smallest room in our old house, and so he was understandably pretty psyched when we moved and his square footage roughly tripled. To be honest, we were a bit surprised at how well Owen embraced his change in fortunes, for while who wouldn't want a huge bedroom with a balcony, Owen generally doesn't like change. At all. He cried when we gave away our old yogurt encrusted dining room table in favor of Grandpa Fawcett's Amana heirloom one. He threw a fit when we got a new toaster oven and tried to throw out the old one. And he informed us that he doesn't want a new bike for Easter unless it's exactly like his old one.

But we had decided when we moved that since Owen had such a large room, it would double as a guest room as needed. And while we've tried to convince our guests that a leaky air mattress is the height of hospitality, eventually I decided that we needed to replace Owen's twin with a full size bed.

So we ordered the exact same bed as Owen's in full-size. We let him pick out Star Wars and National League sheets and a special Nationals pillow case. On his compressed day Allen went and got a mattress while Grandpa assembled the bed. But when Owen arrived home from school and was informed of his new addition, he refused to enter the room to even look at the finished product. When we finally got him to go into the room, Owen refused the touch the new bed and ended up sleeping on the old one with his sleeping bag.

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The next night we got Owen to sleep in his new bed. After a couple days of increasing acceptance of the new paradigm, I announced that I would be selling the old bed online. This did not go over well. Owen informed me that he needed the bed for Legos. I informed him that he could keep the money from the sale. Owen argued that the additional bed meant that even more guests could stay in the room. I informed him a little four year old boy desperately needed the bed. Owen informed me that if I insisted on selling his bed, he was going to go live in the sewers and then promptly burst into tears.

I started laughing. Not because I'm a terrible person who loves crushing her only son's soul, but because I didn't even know where the sewer thing came from (turns out he'd been reading ahead in his Dragonbreath book) and honestly, after Owen cried over the toaster oven his credibility was somewhat shot with me. After a few minutes I gave up trying to cajole him, and called Allen who spent the next 45 minutes talking about how living in the sewer might not be the best solution and if Owen really didn't want to sleep in his room without his old bed, he could instead sleep on the stairs but not the roof.

We had a brief reprieve as the buyers of the bed had to delay the intended pick-up date from Thursday to Saturday. Owen kept asking if he could keep the bed, and we kept saying, "no" which didn't make him hate us, but definitely didn't endear us to him.

Finally, the morning of the pick-up came. Our plan was for Allen to take Owen to the park to play catch during the handover, but instead Owen and Nora decided to stage a concert in Owen's room using the old bed as a stage. With 15 minutes until the buyer's arrival, I finally broke it to Owen that the bed was leaving imminently (he immediately said we needed to turn off all the lights and lock the doors), but... that the people had decided they didn't need the mattress. Owen looked a bit taken aback and said, "You never said they weren't taking the mattress."

So we took the mattress off the bed, and while Nora tried to bar the door when the new owner arrived, Owen calmly went to our room to wait until the the frame was gone and then returned to his room to set up for the show, telling me again, "I didn't know I got to keep the mattress..."

So Owen is now happily sleeping in his new bed, and playing with his old mattress, which I guess means we'll be storing in his closet until he leaves for college.

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1 comment:

Sharon Fawcett said...

Laughing so hard there are tears flowing down my cheeks. Maybe telling him this was the mattress from Mom Mom's attic will allow it to be returned or so we can pretend.