Prindsessen paa Ærten

With the new baby coming (or is he), we knew that we would have to find furniture for Angelina's bedroom and use her current furniture for the baby's new room. For months, we have been scouring Craigslist, ebay and sales advertisements in hopes that we could find something girly for Angelina that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

Eureka! Julene found a beautiful bedroom set on Craigslist for a very reasonable price. However, when she went to look at the set, the seller told her that he only had it in full size, but that he would give it to us for the same price as the twin size set. We decided that a full size set would fit better in Allyse's room, so on Saturday, we played a game of musical rooms.

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I took apart the crib and took the baby furniture down to the new baby's room. Then I took Allyse's bed apart and moved her furniture into Angelina's room.

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It was really hard to gauge how Angelina was going to react, as she tends to be quite possessive and she has invested heavily in being the baby. Since the crib is a primary symbol of her infancy, we thought that she might reject the new bed. However, when it came to bedtime, she seemed pleased to be in a new big bed, and she slept all night without any incident.

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With Allyse's new bedroom set, I brought most of it upstairs by myself, but I had to call on a neighbor to help with the desk and the dresser. However, the toughest part was the shopping. I needed to find bedrails for Angelina and a boxspring and mattress for Allyse.

Every pregnant woman in Southern Nevada, along with her shopping entourage, must have been at Babies R Us when I went to buy bedrails. It seemed nearly impossible to get around the store, but not because of the bellies. Everywhere I went there was a pregnant woman holding court with her family and friends cooing, oohing and ahhing over anything that she would touch or display.

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After I bought the bedrails, I went to look for a mattress set for Allyse. I went to four stores trying to find somebody who actually had something in stock. At the fourth store, they were determined to sell me something. When I found what I wanted, of course, they didn't have it in stock. They went through several mattresses, each progressively more expensive, offering it to me at the same price as the one that I first wanted. By the time they found a mattress in stock, they were offering it to me at less than one-half of its retail price (which gives me a little insight into the markup).

I finally got the mattress set home and we finished Allyse's new bed. When I looked at my little Allyse atop her new bed, I was reminded of the Hans Christian Andersen folktale, The Princess and the Pea (which is the title of this post, in Danish). She truly is a princess.