As far as sleep training goes, check out The Happy Sleeper by Heather Turgeon. I can’t recommend it enough – it’s all about working with your kids’ patterns and developing their ability to self-soothe starting from birth – it’s science-based & it works. They will still cry, but it’s a more controlled/compassionate method and works just as quickly as the Ferber-based methods. After using it to sleep train my almost 2yo who had not slept through the night since birth (worked in 3 nights), I used it on my 2nd & 3rd kids and had them sleeping through by 6months (2nd kid) and 10 weeks (3rd kid). It’s seriously useful & I give it at every baby shower!

Another good summary of this approach is Jeff Bezos’ (Amazon) approach of differentiating “type 1 vs type 2” decisions. https://fs.blog/reversible-irreversible-decisions/

“If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.”

Note that type 2 decisions should be made by a smaller group. So, something like the decision to buy a house is done by only the parents, but something like couch choice can be done by the whole family.

It was much easier than getting our place ready to show multiple times per day and cleaning up from meals at home, etc. This solution wouldn’t work for months, but was well worth the extra $ for a weekend or even a week or two.

As far as moving goes, we had a totally different approach. We bought our new house a month before we moved, so we gradually moved things over. We rented these plastic green moving boxes that were amazing. They self-closed so did not require taping them shut. We moved on a Friday and we had the company pick the boxes back up the following Monday. We only had one child when we moved so that simplifies things a bit – but I think we actually have less stuff now that we have 2 kids and the youngest is over age 1 because that meant we got rid of a ton of baby stuff that takes up so much space, like the bouncer, bassinet, infant seat, etc etc. It’s obviously a different situation when you have 5 kids as that is a lot of stuff!! But for a family with 1-2 kids, a move doesn’t have to be a super stressful weeks long process. The movers arrived at 8 am that Friday morning and said we were the most organized couple they’d moved. They had everything moved in 3.5 hours – the new house was a mile away so that helped. Had we not moved some things over gradually, it probably would have added maybe another hour to the move? Our son was about 18 months at the time, so I was motivated to unpack as much as possible while he was at daycare that day and I managed to unpack the majority before we did pick-up and then finished it up over the weekend.

The CIO thing is a hard call for some couples but wasn’t for us… it was not tenable to be up so often and work full times jobs. If you can function on poor sleep then it’s less of an issue. But unless you get really lucky, most couples do not sleep train just once. We got our son sleeping through the night at 8 months. Then he got sick with a string of ear infections so I was up with him 3+ times/night for months until he got tubes at 13 months. Then we had to get him weaned off of night feeds again, but getting him to STTN took only a couple of days and was much easier than the first round of sleep training at 8 months. But there will always be something to throw sleep off, whether it’s illnesses, teething, etc so babies seem to have to re-learn STTN multiple times!

We did not end up hiring a designer. It was not in our budget and we did mostly keep our design decisions pretty plain but that is a piece of advice is if the budget allows and the decisions are overwhelming then definitely hire a designer!! (It does turn out the contractor did not have a design eye – he did call when i said i wanted black grout with white tile and would have gone with white) There were a few times where i was overwhelmed looking for things like bathroom mirrors. There are a million and one choices but i decided to do that satisficer thing where ultimately i chose one of the options at Home Depot because as you say it’s not the end of the world to get a new bathroom mirror later if i hated it. Whereas i was really sure what i wanted for the ensuite bathroom tile and spent time finding it and getting what i really wanted. And i really love it still. 😀

Room sharing with a toddler is hard!! They are the most important people in the family to have their own room! Before our youngest started sharing with his big brother, his crib was in the guest room and my husband was working from home (pandemic imposed, he will eventually be back at the office) in the big brother’s room! Now that the youngest is sleeping well, his crib and my husband’s desk have swapped places.

We’re in a similar spot in many ways. We loved our location & finding something that fit our needs within this area was $$$$. Even with a six figure reno budget we are coming our WAY ahead over buying or building. This is our only “major” project, but we will likely have a couple of smaller projects over the next few years as budget allows.

@Caitlin – I’m very sure it can be done. I also know that we weren’t doing the room sharing particularly well. Not just the kids– the toddler and me weren’t doing well on room-sharing!

@Gillian – yep, sometimes you just have to picture yourself on the other side. We redid our kitchen and master bathroom in the old house four years ago and they were really so much better – it made me realize sometimes it’s a good idea to change things. It’s a pain for a bit but then they are *much* better. We could not have lived in this house (gut reno in many places…) during renovation, so at least we missed that pain, but took the pain in the form of maintaining two houses!