What did your childhood bedroom look like? Give a tour. How did it change as you matured?

I lived in the same home from the day I was born until I was almost 18 years old, and most of that time my bedroom was located up the front stairs, the first room on the right. This is the room I think of when I imagine my childhood bedroom. I was in another bedroom for the first few years of my life, but I don’t really remember it much.

My childhood bedroom had wall-to-wall carpeting (if I recall correctly, it was first blue and then we changed it to pink) and it was wallpapered the entire time we lived in that house, though the wallpaper changed over the years. My Mom chose the wallpaper when I was a kid, but when I was a teenager the walls – and the rest of my bedroom – took the wrath of my obsession with sunflowers. In addition to sunflower wallpaper, I had a sunflower comforter, sheets and pillowcases. I had a framed picture of a sunflower on my walls, and basically everything sunflower that I ever found was on my shelves and desk.

My Mom and Dad even planted seeds in the garden below my room so I could look out my bedroom window and see sunflowers every August. 🙂

Over the years, in my childhood bedroom I learned how to get through the break-up of a friendship, how to nurse a broken heart, how to break someone else’s heart as gently as possible. I nervously dialed the phone numbers of boys I liked. I wrote stories and journaled. I stayed up late studying for tests. I hand-wrote letters to friends. All in my childhood bedroom.

One of my favorite childhood memories is the period of time that Audrey and I both slept in my bedroom. I think it was when we were tweens. I had a trundle bed that raised up to the size of a queen-sized bed and we would both sleep in my room, falling asleep as we talked about our days and laughed about sister things.

I’ve had quite a few bedrooms since we moved out of that house just before I started college. In some ways, it seems like I lived there a lifetime ago. In other ways, it seems like only yesterday I was covering my childhood bedroom walls with photos of my favorite models, actors and actresses, which I’d ripped out of magazines. Or making collages of photos of me and my friends. Or making mix tapes for my boyfriend.

I have some great memories of my childhood bedroom, ones that I’ll always treasure whenever I want to take a trip down memory lane.

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