We have just come home from our summer vacation and spent our final night jockeying for mattress space.

We started with the following predictable bedroom assignments; Bedroom 1: Mommy & Daddy, Bedroom 2: Chloe (age 2), Bedroom 3: Hanna (8) and Ellie (6).

In bedroom one, we had one queen bed. Chloe also had a queen bed in her room which made me a little nervous at first given she has just recently transitioned from crib to “big-girl-small-bed” and Hanna and Ellie had turned a comfortable set of bunk beds into a tangled mess of blankets, clothes, curtain tie-backs, dried reptile skeletons and a fairly extensive shell collection. Affectionately named “Fort Hanna” until some of the affection turned to rage and the name was changed to “Fort Ellie,” or, “Fort Why Do You ALWAYS Get Your Way?”

The week went by with just a few middle-of-the-night incidents. One night Chloe cried while her legs dangled from the edge of the queen bed like she was falling from a high rise balcony so I spent the rest of the night in her bed wearing a tandem five point harness.

Another night, Ellie’s sore ear bothered her so I brought her into bedroom 1 and my roommate from bedroom 1 shuffled into bedroom two to once again tether the baby safely in place.

Then last night, we started in our rightful positions but somewhere along the way moved Ellie in with Chloe as both queen bed supervisor and to move a little girl with a throbbing ear drum away from the bongos she could hear pounding deep in the heart of the jungle of a fort she was buried under.

Around midnight, I heard Hanna who typically sleeps very soundly but she was whimpering due to an ill-timed Just For Laughs-Gags episode where she happened to catch a scene with a scary man behind a mirror. She said she was picturing the man which would be easy to do given her cave-like surroundings so I climbed into the bottom bunk of Fort Nobody Sleeps and started down a path of first gasping for air under the suffocation wall and then unraveling Hanna from the upper body sausage skin she had created from our one and only shared blanket. She was wrapped from the top of her head to the middle of her torso but was surprisingly content and warm to the touch despite the rest of her body lying coverless. I shivered and wept as I thought of the Just For Laughs guy and how he would have totally loved this fort.

I then heard a shout out from bedroom two but I can’t be in two bedrooms that I was never meant to be in at once so Daddy came to the rescue of Ellie who was still suffering long after her Advil had been administered. He brought her in to take my spot in bedroom 1 and considered a suction cup device for Chloe’s shoulders to be mounted on the headboard.

We woke up in the morning with Ellie and Daddy in bedroom 1, Hanna and Mommy in bedroom 3 (Fort Hypothermia) and the baby slept soundly in the queen bed alone with no seatbelts and without incident.

I’m pretty sure Jack, Chrissy and Janet were in bedroom four but even though the sign said, “Come and knock on our door,” I didn’t.