The best of both worlds

(That’s not a reference to a certain Disneyfied pop star, BTW.)

One of the quirks of our old house is the second-floor layout. At the top of the stairs, there is a wide hallway with five doors visible: two on the left, two on the right, one straight ahead. On the left is the bathroom and one bedroom. On the right is a little storage room (we have no attic) and another bedroom. If you open the straight-ahead door, you enter an odd little anteroom where you’ll find another three doors. To the left, there is a small bedroom/office. Forward is another odd-shaped closet, and on the right is another bedroom which adjoins, via a connecting door, to the adjacent bedroom (the one on the right from before, you follow?).

When we first moved in, Jo was just turning two and of course Opie wasn’t born yet, although we hoped we’d have another child in the next few years. We were a little stumped, at first, about how to allocate the bedrooms. Except for the office, they are all about the same size. The stand-alone one was already painted an incredibly girlie shade of pink. Of the adjoined rooms, one is a bit brighter (it has two exposures) but its closet is outside the room and doesn’t have much hanging space. Also (see below) it had this crazy coral-with-white-stencils thing going on which mayyyyybe could have worked for an adult room but not a kid’s. The neighboring room–it was yellow then–has some nice built-ins and a good closet. We thought about making it the master and giving Jo the pink room, and turning the tangerine!! room into some kind of den or sitting room. But then what would happen if/when we had another kid? Or we could give Jo the sunny room (who cares if a two-year-old has a closet) and keep the yellow one for ourselves. We’d be right next to each other, but could still close the adjoining doors, and we’d save the pink room for another child.

In the end, we took the pink room for ourselves (but painted it pronto) and for a year, Jo had herself a two-room suite. The yellow room, equipped with closet, became her bedroom, and the sunny room became a playroom.

I told you the paint job was wacky.

These days, that yellow room is–surprise!–pink. Opie has the adjoining, once-coral playroom (and no place to hang his clothes, but that’s yet to become an issue). You can see part of the set of connecting doors at that pink link. The kids get to be very close,  but still have their own separate spaces. Tonight, we’ve dragged one of the mattresses from his trundle bed onto the floor of her room, and he’s sleeping in there. When we first put up that trundle bed, Jo slept in it for months, alongside her little brother. Lately, they’ve designated the spot behind the big armchair in his room their “office”; they sit back there and read books together and eat contraband candy. They haven’t yet learned to hide the wrappers.

I don’t know what we’ve done, if anything, to foster their closeness. Maybe they’re just different enough not to grate on each other too much: one boy, one girl, three years apart in age. Maybe we said some magic words once upon a time that have kept rivalry largely at bay, thus far (universe, please notice my caveats). Maybe they were just born with compatible temperaments. Maybe we’re just lucky.

Or maybe it’s that double door, the one that lets them have their own special relationship, different from any other they have with parents or teachers or friends or other relatives. They’re a team within a team, and they have the clubhouse to prove it.