New House

We are very excited to tell everyone that we are moving.  Not very far, but still it's exciting to be moving.  We have lived in our current house for the last 8 1/2 years.  We moved in Christmas Eve, 2 weeks before Zachary was born.  It's amazing that when we moved in this house, that we only had 2 kids.  Now we are moving out with 6 kids.  We have definitely had great times in this house as we have been expanding our family.  Most of our kids have learned to walk in this house and this house holds a lot of memories.  I would say that Zachary is having the hardest time with the move.  He doesn't want to leave our current house.  I'm sure he will change his mind once we are moved in to the new house.  We went to the new house last night and the kids loved it.  The back yard is at least twice as big as our current back yard we have now.  We are a large family so I was very excited to hear that is has 3 1/2 bathrooms.  Here are a few pictures of the house.....

   

I love the kitchen, it is very open!

The laundry room is huge, for me anyway!!  This is just one side of it!

This is one side of the backyard from the deck!  The kids had fun last night

 running back and forth across it!

How does this happen??

The decluttering process has began.  It is amazing how much clutter can develop in your house over time.  The more kids you have, it seems the more clutter you have.  I have not done the greatest job at keeping it clean and organized over the last few months.  Life gets busy and before you know it, boom!  Your house is a clutter magnet! 
Over the next few days, this is going to be my project I'm attempting to tackle.  So far, I have done the laundry room and the front closet!  It is amazing how much junk fills these two rooms.  My dryer was piled down with stuff.  The laundry room took about an hour to clean.  I didn't think to take before pictures, but here are the after pictures!

This is the laundry room, it had so much clutter in it.  Looks so much better organized and cleaned out!

This is our front closet!  It had so many coats and sweatshirts in it.  I was able to go through them and put some away.  We don't each need 2-3 different coats/sweatshirts in here.  The kids had been throwing all kinds of stuff on the floor in here.  Our vacuum barely fit in here before I cleaned it out!

I'm trying to do the downstairs first and then I will tackle the upstairs!!  Wish me luck!

Having a Large Family

If you would have told me years ago that I would have 6 children, I would have told you that you were crazy in the head!!  But now I wouldn't change it for anything in the world!  When we go to the store as a family, everyone feels the need to comment on how many kids we have.  They say some crazy things..... are they all yours? you know what causes that right? how do you manage? why would you have all those kids? you're not having anymore are you? wow you have your hands full!  What people don't realize, is that having a large family is such a blessing.  We have so much love for each other and it's always a party in our house.  Yes, it is loud and crazy, but Chris and I are loud and crazy kind of people!  So, it works for us!  It was nice to see that I'm not alone on getting these comments.  I just wish people would take notice of the things they are saying to others! 
 I was online looking up information on large families and came across a lot of great posts.  Here are a few that I saw:

Q:  You got your hands full!
A:  I wouldn't rather have my hands full of anything else!

Q:  How many kids do you have, anyway?
A:  I dunno.(gets them to stop talking)


Q:  Don’t you have a TV?
A:  If you think TV is better than sex, then you are doing it wrong.
 
Q:  But you’re stopping now, right?
A:  Of course! Lots of people have nine kids. Nine kids is nothing. Of course, our van is longer than most people’s driveways. We own two milch cows just to supplement breakfast. And with the money from our Additional Child Tax Credit, we bought a small island in Capri. That’s life with nine kids.
But to consider having ten kids? You’re right, that would be cuh-razy.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/snappy-answers-for-stupid-questions-about-your-big-family#ixzz2OYvlv4ES

Here's a you tube video that I love.  We've heard all these remarks toward our family!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaD8xat6VDw

Something I noticed a lot of people saying on these other sites are how they wish people they knew would be more supportive of them having a large family and to show excitement when they are pregnant(as if it was their first one).  A lot of people today think you should have 1-2 kids and that's it.  1-2 kids isn't for everyone.  Some people don't want any kids and that's great for them, but some of us want to have a large family and we shouldn't be criticized for it.  Having children is a personal choice for everyone to make on their own.  I just thought I would share some of my personal experiences and findings online about this subject.