Sister, Sister

My sister and I shared a bedroom for well over half of our childhood. I didn't realize just how long we roomed together until my sister brought it up the other day. We finally got our own rooms when I was 12 and she was 14. So basically, in terms of kid years, we were together forever.

Very early on, our beds were a weird makeshift situation that my mom put together in a moment of frugal creativity: they were large pieces of foam positioned over what I can only describe as very short dressers. (Yes, it was weird.) At one point, the "beds" were lined up in one long line and my sister and I slept with our feet pointed towards each other. At least, we slept that way in theory. In reality, I often slept with my butt high in the air and pointed at my sister. Did I ever mention I was one of those kids who liked to be naked? And that I insisted on sleeping on top of my covers, rather than underneath them? My poor 5-year-old sister. Every night was a full moon.

Another memory I have is how my sister was kind enough to warm the bed for me each night for most of the years that we roomed together. Now if Husband were to offer to "warm the bed" for me, I would throw up a little in my mouth. Getting into a warm bed is more than a little icky, isn't it? Something about the warmth is suspect - how do I know for sure that it's regular old body heat creating the warmth and not, say, a plethora of gas? Anyway, as a child I was generally a spaz and would get into bed and thrash all over the place, moaning about how cold I was and how I couldn't sleep when it was so cooooold. So my sister would trade places with me for a bit; I would lie in her warm bed and she would get into mine for 15 minutes and lie still enough to warm it up and then we would switch back. Isn't that sweet in a weird Mary-and-Laura-shared-a-tin-cup-on-the-Prairie kind of way?

Of course, there were a lot of pranks. A favorite would be the time I hid in her bed when she was getting ready in the bathroom. I crawled in and lay as flat as I could against the wall where the covers were kind of lumpy anyway. She finished in the bathroom, got into bed and I attacked her. Fun!

My sister, being older, wiser, and a historian, is able to recount other incidents of which I have no memory. She just told me that there was a time towards the end of our room sharing days, when my mom rearranged our room so that our metal day beds were back to back. This created a freakish crib-like situation, which is wildly ridiculous for a teen and a tween, not to mention the fact that limbs could stretch over to the other's bed in the middle of the night. You would wake up to a hand right by your face or a leg touching your leg through the pseudo-crib bars. Needless to say, that set up only lasted for a short time.

Lately, I've been feeling bad about the fact that Bella will have to share a room once her sibling(s) start arriving. We simply will not have any more space for separate bedrooms and it seems like we'll be in our townhome a little longer than I had originally planned. But you know what? I think the room sharing will probably turn out to be a really good thing. That is, as long as we can keep full moons to a minimum.