6 kids, 6 dogs, 3 adults, 2 rabbits,1 house.

This is the story of a generous woman, a full house and how we are making it all work.

My dear friend opened her home to us recently and even said we could bring the pets! This is astounding to me that someone who 3 years ago I did not even know opened her home, and let us come live with her and her children. Yes its short term as we should be getting orders from the Military for active duty soon. But let me tell you it sure makes people turn their head and wonder "How are you doing that?"

Well my simple answer is with organization! Truly it is one of my favorite things. everything has a place and if it always gets put back in that place then its easy to find and nobody is tripping over it all. This of course is not nearly as easy as it sounds. Especially when you are working with people who are not used to this type of living. Kids are all learning to share space quite well actually. I think my youngest two are having the hardest time mostly because they are not used to sharing their bedroom with the entertainment room. You see the house has 3 bedrooms and in order to not displace my friend from her room we doubled up the older kids and turned the front living room into a half bedroom half game room for the kids. This actually will work very well once we finally get a good system down. The kids computer is going in there and the movies and game systems. This will allow them to have a room to play in and a room for us to gather in. We are using a curtain to separate the rooms and if i could just get the older one to stop harassing the little ones verbally we would be golden.

The dogs each have their own "beds" because we have each of the crate trained. It was a challenge trying to decide what room to put their beds in but I think we have it worked out so that we have plenty of room for all the animals and plenty of room for the people.

Combining two households can be complicated... I think we are getting by fairly unscathed. There have been no major fights, not even between the adults. I also know when I have had enough and I go to my garage  room. Last night was one of those nights... I was burnt out after a whole day of paper writing for school. I made dinner and then my loving husband who is leaving in 4 days scarfed it down not saying a word and then went on to complete a project he was working on. It all left me feeling very weary and I went to bed early. I excused myself after tucking kids and dogs into bed and then got caught up folding clothes that I had neglected for many days now.   Have I said how hard it is to combine households yet?  

I am still searching for balance in my home education of 4 kids, college education for myself, and now living with another family that requires me to combine our households. It really isn't as bad as it might sound and I am so happy that we have a place to land until the rest of it works out... now the waiting for the rest of it to work out is the hard part!

I am also longing to get to the creative part of me and I simply do not have the time yet! maybe soon... I hope!