For her 8th birthday, I wanted to give Kyla a clean slate. There is something about her brain that doesn’t stop her from writing on walls, ceilings, furniture. Or cutting window screens or curtains. Or…anything that involves the mildest bit of impulse control.
We both needed a mulligan. Badly.
So on the afternoon of her birthday, Dwayne took the sledge hammer and knocked out her badly-designed closet. Then Jim and I started the next day. It took some drywall, paint, new flooring, and lots and lots of labor. Jim did a custom-built closet for her on the other side of the room, with all the drawers, cabinets, and hanging space any person would every need. I bought and repainted a craigslist desk and he built bookshelves above them. I made it everything she said she wanted and what I thought she would really want, and made it as pretty and clean as possible so she would really want to take care of it.
I bought her a pretty bed with a trundle (so no room to shove stuff under her bed) to replace her bunk bed (no longer able to write on the mattress or ceiling above her). I got her a papasan chair in a reading corner—also impossible to stand on and deface the ceiling. I put up a baseboard with clips across one entire wall for easy display of her art. Almost everything in there is to keep her from doing what she used to do. So far, it’s working!
The bed was one of the final touches. Another craigslist find, I brought it home late one night. We transferred Kyla to her new room while she was sleeping. As we should have known, by morning Wesley had found her and settled in for a snuggle, making himself perfectly at home! Kyla woke up thrilled to be in her new bedroom.
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