peelosophy

In junior high I transferred from a private all-girl school to a public co-ed school. That is a heck of a transition for a junior high girl!

By God’ grace, I became instant friends with a group of girls, of which most of them also had transferred from all girl schools. We were called The 6-Pack because their were 6 of us and we were inseparable. I don’t know if this name was given to us or if self-proclaimed, but it was junior high – if you had a place or a name where you fit in – it was half the battle.

I’ve been thinking of my junior high 6-pack lately, especially when I stop and realize that we are now a family of 6. Even writing that,  it is crazy to me. Don’t get me wrong, we wanted a big family and I’m from a family of 6 — this should not be that crazy to me!

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I have been asked this question over and over again – probably about once a day.

I understand why people ask it, I probably would too.  I guess it’s a logical question since we will have 4 kids come December and live in a 2-bedroom house.  Just with the repetition of he question- all I hear is “What is wrong with you?”

The fact of the matter is, we are fine where we are right now.  We are not crawling up the walls or begging for privacy.  We are very happy.  So if that makes us weird – so be it.  I’ve found that it definitely makes us outside of the norm, which is something I’m fine with, but in this situation, I find myself questioning our feelings.

This questioning has led me to late googling; the specific search, “big family small house”.  Wow.  That search was very comforting.  I found myself from feeling “little old woman who  lived in the shoe-ish” to feeling that our 900 square feet was spacious and sharing rooms was normal.  Try it.

The other thing I did, in search for peace with our decision, was rented the first season of Little House on Prairie.  My goal was to figure out how Ma did it?  Family of five living in a cabin surely smaller than our house.  Where did she put all the toys?  What about clutter? How did she organize the closets effectively?  Honestly, it took me about 3 episodes into it to realize that it was a movie set and watching the rest of the season was not going to answer my questions.  I know I was/am crazy.

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Easter yesterday started with crazy but overall was a ton of fun.  I try to keep pretty low expectations for holidays mainly for my sanity.  I’ve found if I have no expectations of how the boys behave or how smoothly everything thing will go b/c of my “perfect planning” – things will go okay.

This year, I did have expectations – well one really – that the boys wear the ties that I made them for the day.  All week, I talked up the ties, they picked out their own fabric for their own tie…I thought I was on easy street.

John worked sound for church Sunday morning so he was out the door at 8am.  No biggie, I was prepared to get them ready myself and had John tie the ties so I just had to put them over their heads and tighten them.  Henry and George were easy…JJ threw the biggest fit about wearing a button-up shirt and a tie.  I NEVER make him wear stuff, he always gets to pick out his own clothes, so I didn’t understand why this one day he couldn’t do this “for me”.  I was ticked, at one point I actually said, “You are going to wear this friggin’ tie and it’s going to be cute!” Not one of most admirable mom-moments.  He got in the van with his Trans Am t-shirt, I was over it.

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