My, doesn’t life move quickly sometimes! I often feel like every week around here goes fast and is packed full with much too much to tell. 🙂

My mom, who’s been living with us for ten months, found a place to live on Thursday morning, so we spent part of Thursday, Friday, and then last night helping her move all her stuff with our nice big van and the arms of many willing helpers. I’m glad we were able to have her for this time, but I think she’ll enjoy her own space, and we will enjoy having the extra space.

While my mom was living in the basement, we used one of the bedrooms as a playroom. Contrary to popular expectations, big families don’t necessarily have or need much bigger houses than everyone else. Our house is a pretty modest size, though I’m very happy with the layout and it works well for us. We have three bedrooms, plus the new bedroom that we just finished making in the attic (ds13 painted most of it yesterday, and will hopefully paint the ceilings today).

You may be wondering how everyone fits in (I’ve been asked before :)), so here’s how we do it: the 3 older boys are in one room, the 3 girls in the other – we have two bunk beds in each kids’ room, so there is still room in each of those two bedrooms for another child. We’re in the attic bedroom, and ds14 months just moved to the third bedroom/playroom a week or so ago. That bedroom is the smallest and has all the toys, books, dress up clothes – you know, everything. 🙂 Last night we started moving stuff down to the basement, and it’s wonderful how roomy both the basement and third bedroom now feel!

I’m so glad that my mom moved in with us a couple of weeks after we bought this house, before we ever got used to having the basement as a living space. That way, it wasn’t something we were giving up to have her using, and now, it’s like a new house almost to have more space! We’re doing a lot of shifting things around. We moved all the board games and a bunch of toys down, as well as the foosball table. Mom is leaving her futon, so we will continue being able to have her as a weekend guest, or have other people stay down there. It’s important to me to be able to have guests able to stay overnight, which is why when I bought our living room furniture, I made to sure to get a sleeper sofa. Then when we needed more seating space, I got another sleeper sofa, this one with two separate twins beds. So technically we could sleep four people in the living room, but there’s no privacy so it’s nice to have the basement for them to stay in. (The kids love to sleep there, though, on weekend nights it’s a special privilege that we often allow.) Until about a month ago, we also had a full sized futon in the playroom (for potential guests), but that was given away when we decided we’d rather use the space for a foosball table, and then last week, we moved ds’s portacrib in there. So it was getting a little squishy in that room.

Are you wondering what we will do what that third bedroom now? Don’t worry, the space won’t be wasted! We still have all the bookshelves in there (for now – when we finish the attic bathroom, I’m thinking of moving them where they can line the hallway that leads to the attic), and the dressers. The current baby will continue to stay in there until he’s ready to move into the boys’ room (at least that was my plan until recently, and haven’t decided on a new course of action yet), and then we will move the new babies in when they are old enough to leave our room. (We usually move our babies out of our room around at a year old.)

It’s just amazing how much space this relatively small house has for us all when we use it well!

Avivah