u/Sneaku1579

We are so lucky to be parents of 2 wonderful girls. One is a little over 3 years old and the other is 4 months old. The baby is still in our room with us. But we moved our oldest out around the 6 month mark so we are preparing to transition her. Before the baby was born we prepared our third bedroom to be a nursery for her to move into. As life has unfolded with our new family dynamic, we are rethinking that decision.

Our toddler absolutely loves her sister and has expressed her desire to share her room with her. We have combined their bed times for one person to be able to do it rather than us splitting up and it's working really well so that the other parent can clean up/relax and then we reconvene together to spend some time alone after they are both asleep. They both fall asleep in their respective beds with us just sitting next to them, but currently the toddler waits for the parent to put the baby down in our room and then come back to her.

We are seriously considering just putting them in the same room together since I think it would work really well with their bed time routine and they don't seem to be waking each other up at night, if one wakes for whatever reason. I think we are really lucky in this sense and given the toddlers desire to share a room, I think it might be sweet for them to do so.

My concern is the safety of the baby, since she is supposed to sleep alone in her bed until 12 months. I have a feeling our toddler will want to snuggle with her or put stuffed animals next to her to "help her sleep", as she does during the day now when she is next to me soothing the baby for naps. We have the option of either keeping her in our room until a year of age or putting her in the nursery between 6-12 months.

I just wanted to gauge other parents experience with room sharing and how it went at this age and onwards as the kids got older. TIA

My husband and I just bought a house that happens to have a pool. It wasn't a requirement for us, but everything else about this place was perfect to us so we decided that we'd deal with it. We've been slowly swapping out plastic stuff in our lives over the last few years and have made great progress. Now that we took on this pool situation, I feel like we've stepped a thousand steps backwards. It's above ground so the whole thing is a giant plastic bucket hanging out in the beating sun all day long. All the chemicals for maintenance come in plastic containers. All the pool toys/floats are all plastic that disintegrates in a single season due to the sun and chemicals. I just collected two garbage bags worth of broken down plastic nonsense left by the previous owners that have been baking in their plastic outdoor storage bins for God knows how long. It's just plastic on top of plastic, on top of plastic. Does anyone in this community own a pool? How do you even begin to reduce here besides getting rid of this thing which obviously creates an insane amount of waste? Just looking for an open discussion on where people make compromises and how to maintain this part of our new home in the most ethical way possible.