Step by Step: I love Clark's room

This may seem like a strange title for a post at this time. It would make since if I wrote about the move, the new church, Michael's new job, etc, but the thing that struck me this morning and compelled me to write was Clark's new room. In general I hate moving, but one thing I like about it is it causes me to reorganize in a new space. When things stay the same for too long I get in a rut, clutter builds up and I'm unmotivated to pull it all out and rearrange. Every time we move I get a chance to look at the things we have, purge those we aren't using and get a fresh look at how I want to organize our belongings.

Clark's room is about the same size as his room in St. Augustine except now he has the room completely to himself. I loved our townhouse in St. Augustine, but the one drawback it had was that Clark's room was also the guest room. Whenever we had company (which thankfully we had often) we would have to kick Clark out of his room and put him in the pack-n-play in our room (or if it was Joel, Caroline or my parents we just left him in the crib and they snuck in quietly when they went to bed--he slept better, but it was an inconvenience to them). Now we have three bedrooms, so Clark gets his own room.

Although his room looks virtually the same as it did before there are two main differences.
1. He has more floor space and it's on the first floor so he actually plays in his room now.
2. I put his books on his bookshelf instead of in a basket next to the rocker.
The second difference sounds minor, but it has brought me great joy. You see, now that his books are on the shelf he gets down from the rocker and picks out his own books. Here's our basic routine at bedtime and naptime: I sit in the rocker and Clark goes to the shelf to pick out a book, he comes back to the rocker with the book and turns around backwards for me to pick him up and put him in my lap. I loving seeing which books he picks. He'll stand at the shelf and look at several before he makes his selection and then he runs over to the rocker to show me what he picked. There are certain books he chooses every time. He loves the "5 Silly Monkey's" book and does the motions with me every time we read it. He's also obsessed with the moon so he loves "The Foot Book" by Dr. Seuss because on the page where it says "feet at night" there's a picture of the moon. He turns back to that page at least three times every time we read it.

This move has been hard on all of us. Michael and I have had an overload of emotional stress since there seemed to be complications at every turn. We had more problems than I can list with the moving company, a place to live was like a rollercoaster ride: one day we had a place, the next we didn't, and then maybe we had a place. It was like that every day for the two weeks we were packing. Clark had a rough time too. His schedule was completely interrupted, he slept in a different bed every night and had different people caring for him. His behavior was horrible and Michael and I had both decided he was going to make us prematurely old. Now that he's gotten a little bit more settled (granted it's only been a week) his behavior has improved. He still has quite a few fits and ugly moments, but his sweetness has come back.

We spend a good bit of time in his room because he loves reading his books and I love snuggling with him while we're reading. I can't tell you how happy I am that he loves to read. He sits still longer to read than he does even to eat. So, while it may sound weird to say, I love Clark's room!