Family: Where there is God, there is love, where there is Love, there is room for one more...
This IKEA piece has 12 drawers--one for each child. The drawers are deep and hold a lot. This is the most functional piece of furniture I own.
Our sun room works as a therapy room...most of the great equipment we have found is courtesy of auctionmasters.com. We find great things there and it can be very cheap!
I just found this wonderful chalk board in the back room of an antique store (I love the back lot stuff--it usually isn't breakable or expensive like the stuff in the antique store!) I use white wet erase markers instead of chalk so that it doesn't get wiped off by little hands to write out all of the schedules of the kids who need meds/feedings/nebs etc...
A sleeping baby..what could be a better addition to any home?There are often a couple of visual images that are created in the minds of others when they hear that there are 12 of us living under one roof....The first is a mental video clip of the movie "Cheaper by the dozen" with children wildly flinging food across the room...complete with frogs, snakes and other amphibians running freely...probably one of them stuck in syrup that has poured all over the floor.
The next visual picture that is conjured up in the minds of Mom's everywhere...especially Moms of children who have special needs...is the paperwork...mounds and mounds of it everywhere..stuffed in closets, laundry baskets and brown paper bags waiting for a day when an important form needs to be returned to school and all the piles must be dumped out and sorted in an attempt to find that long lost paper.
While we have never had a food fight around here, we have had times when the paperwork looks exactly as described. But I have found some great ways to tackle the paperwork monster. I have a drawer for each of the children that holds all that child's paperwork. Each of the more involved special needs kids have a binder that stores all of the educational, medical, therapy and social services paperwork...and everything fits into their drawer. IKEA is most likely the best friend of those with a need to organize their paperwork.
Our home is busy but it is not chaotic. We decorate with toys...both old and new. When I walk into our home, I feel a sense of peace and comfort even in the midst of the busyness. Anything of monetary value that we may have once owned has been broken or given away which has freed us from worry and stress. I home is livable but not cluttered or chaotic. It is home...as it should be. A safe, comfortable place to be where everyone is welcome to come and hang out awhile..
I thought I would share some pictures of how we live.
Soon, I want to tell the story of how we found this home...or how it found us. God orchestrated every detail of our relocation to this home that has 8 bedrooms and an elevator while we were busy trying to find contentment in the smaller home that we lived in at the time. It is a great story of God's provision in our lives...to be continued..
