Reply to Sensitive Asperger's Teen and New Baby (Long)

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a new stepmom to a very sweet, bright 15 year-old with Asperger's. She lives with her mom in another state the majority of the time and is with us for summers and vacations. She's well-adjusted and extremely high functioning without any social issues. Her Asperger's is mostly evident in that she is a very sensitive child and a bit of a late bloomer, emotionally. For example, she still sleeps with a light on, likes us to read out loud to her at night, and is very affectionate, often wanting to hold hands with us when we're walking somewhere. Overall, she is close with both her dad and with me, and we all truly enjoy family time together. Given the total nightmare I was for my parents at 15, we feel very lucky!

As newlyweds, my husband and I are planning to expand the family and have a baby next year. If all goes according to plan, my stepdaughter would have a sibling arrive sometime in the second half of her junior year in high school, when she is about 16.5 years old. She is a little nervous (she's an only child with no younger siblings or cousins so has had no real exposure to kids other than crying babies on planes), but mostly excited about a sibling. She enjoys brainstorming baby names and joking about how she's never going to change a diaper.

We recently relocated to DC and moved into a three-level townhouse with three bedrooms -- there is an en-suite bedroom on the first floor and two bedrooms on the third level. She chose the second bedroom on the third level next to ours as hers, so she could be close to us and because she has a very healthy imagination (and ironically enough, a major Stephen King habit) and didn’t want to be alone on the ground floor when we were two floors away. She loves our new home and her bedroom, especially. But when it comes time that we will need a nursery, we plan on moving her downstairs to the first level and using her current bedroom as the baby's room since we want to have the baby close by, on the same level of the house as us. We have not explicitly told her this yet since it's still so far out.

My MIL was on the phone with my stepdaughter last night and asked her how she liked her new home and room, and if she ever wanted to move down to the guest room to have more privacy, more freedom to play her music loudly, etc. My stepdaughter emphatically told her no, that she was always going to stay in her room because she loved it so much, and that the guest room was for guests, and she was a family member so would never use that room as hers.  My MIL, knowing our plan for a baby and the need to move bedrooms one day, and surprised with how emotional the conversation had been, didn't know what to say, so stayed mum and then called my husband and me to relay the conversation.

I am sure I am overthinking things here, but should we be concerned at this point? Should we discuss this future room change with her now? The earliest this would take place would be in 1.5 years when she'll be finishing 11th grade and getting ready to go into her senior year. I'm hoping that at that time she'd be more mature and probably not care at all or as much about where her room was, and would also see the importance of us being in close proximity to a newborn.

I want to be careful and thoughtful here, especially because she is a hormonal, emotional teenager who doesn't get to see her dad as much as she wants to. I would never want her to feel that with a new sibling on the scene and with us full time, that she would be less our kid somehow or is being delegated to the guest room as such. At the same time I don't want to baby her or change our plan for where we need to have a nursery. She is pretty adaptive to change -- we're a military family so she is quite used to moves and new surroundings – and, while an only child, she spends a lot of time with her mom’s live-in boyfriend’s children, who he is partial custody of.

At a distance, this seems like a no brainer. If I read this post I’d roll my eyes and say “She only lives with you 20% of the time and she’ll be an older teen when a baby comes – move her room and tell her to get over it.” But this is a sensitive kid and I’m a new stepmom, so I know I need to be cautious.

Any thoughts? 
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