Much is afoot chez nous. Come next Monday we’ll have one daughter in the final year of her basic schooling, another starting kindergarten, and a third embarking on her first year of pre-school. Tage’s changes aren’t so major, but even he will have some differences to adjust to at school, not least being a new lead teacher (he’ll still have his “old” teacher for some lessons, but the majority will be with someone else). And me, I’ll have three mornings a week on my own with Yrsa. That’ll take some getting used to, as well.

As if all that weren’t enough, the time has come for Tage to have his own bedroom, and we’ve decided to undertake that major operation in the upcoming days. It’s not as simple, see, as just moving the boy to a different space. Oh, no.

Olof and I will be surrendering our room to Petra and Brynja, who currently bunk in with Tage. The two of us (and Yrsa) will be moving downstairs to what can loosely be called the guest room (that is, any guests we have do sleep there, but really it’s more of a storage area). Even that sounds simple enough, I guess, until you take into account all the stuff that’s got to be moved along with the people. First we’ve got to clear out the guest room, taking a heavy sofa bed, at least one table, and probably some shelving and old computers out to the garage. Then we’ll take our (very large) bed and miscellaneous other furniture downstairs and put it in our new room. Next we’ll disassemble the bunkbed that’s currently in the kids’ room and transfer it and Petra’s dresser to the girls’ new room, and finally, we’ll bring in the various pieces of Tage’s bunkbed from the garage and get them put back together in his room. I get tired just thinking about it.

Once it’s all said and done, though, I think it will be a nice change. It will be different for us to sleep so far from the kids, but I’m pretty sure it will be okay. I’m hoping that it will cut down on them making forts in our bed during the day and scattering our bedding all over the place, at least. And when our bedroom is no longer off the kitchen, Asbjørn will surely be leaving fewer empty bread wrappers and sundry cooking utensils for us to find when we turn back our blankets each night. That alone might make all the heavy lifting worth it.