We spent a whole week completing the "Great Bedroom Switch of 2010."

We waged the final battle against the Spare Room of Doom—I’ll wait for the applause to stop—so that our oldest daughter could turn it into her own tween retreat. Our youngest daughter then moved out of her cubicle of a bedroom into our oldest daughter’s former bedroom.

As you can guess, this task was monumental! We even had to bring in the big gun from Pittsburgh—my mother. She is the queen of organization and makes Martha Stewart look like a slob. We never would have finished—who am I kidding—never would have started without her!

Both girls were ecstatic to have bigger bedrooms, until my youngest daughter woke up crying, "Mama, I want the sunshine back in my room in the morning! I don’t have sunshine in my room anymore. It’s just a big shadow."

She was sobbing because her old room faces the eastern side of the house and lets in the bright morning sun. Her new room faces the western side of the house and is in complete shade until the afternoon.

I was floored. How do I fix this? I tried explaining how the sun would be in her room around lunch time, but that wasn’t helping. She just cried harder. I asked her (while gritting my teeth) if she wanted to move back to her old room.

"No mama, I just want the sunshine in my new room, in the MORNING." The problem sounded so simple yet impossible to fix. So I did what any sitcom mom would do, and said, "Let’s go wake daddy up and you can tell him all about your problem." Well, of course, Daddy did what daddy’s do best. He wrapped her in a bear hug and told her to tell him about it, while glaring at me with his I-hate-mornings face.

About thirty seconds after the last tear dried up, my oldest daughter walked into our bedroom, holding her head, "Mom, I’m getting a migraine—there’s too much sun in my room." This was such a typical frumpy moment that I couldn’t help but laugh. She ended up in her old shady bedroom sleeping off the migraine, while my youngest came up with a solution to her problem. "Mama, buy a yellow lamp and put it near the window, then every morning, you can turn it on before I wake up and it will look like the sun is shining in my room."

Do you know there seems to be a shortage of yellow table lamps in Richmond? However, I did find sunshine yellow curtains. Another crisis averted in the Frumpy Zone.

For more Frumpy Zone fun, go to the frumpyzone.blogspot.com or check out the Frumpy Zone Facebook page. RPM