This should shed some light on why my hubby and I have an open door policy in our home, have had many people live with us and why I don’t see my busy life as chaos.

Thanks La La for letting me share it on my blog. Check out her blog for other memories, she’s definitely better at remembering than me!

Christmas Memory #3

I think mostly when I think about Christmas, “Family” is the one word that is first and foremost in my mind.

I love my family.

I am the youngest of 4 girls. We had foster kids in our home as I was growing up and we always had someone staying with us. We had our cousins, who really are more like sisters, live with us as well. If there was someone speaking at our church…they stayed with us! The more the merrier was a life lesson we all learned well. From outcasts to refugees… literally!! We have had our share of couch crashers and learning to share whether we liked it or not!

We had no idea that a large part of our childhood our parents were struggling financially… something I think today’s kids are much more aware of and I wish mine were more like how I had it as a child. We always had great food. My mom became a cook extraordinaire and she learned to make a little stretch a lot. At one point we had us 4 girls, a cousin or 2, a foster sister, and a boy staying with us so he could go to the private church basement school we went too… but that’s a whole other post!! We did this all with only 1 bathroom!!! That’s right, 1 bathroom!!!! Let’s just say there was plenty of banging on the bathroom doors and plenty of fighting over mirror time with all those teenagers… my sister Shash and I were way too little to be primping in front of the mirror although I would have done anything to just be a part of whatever was going on… cuz surely something was always going on in that household and as the youngest of it all I knew just KNEW that I was missing out something great and wonderful! 🙂

Christmas just has that great overwhelming feeling of family… the more the merrier is how I like it… fill the table till we have NO more room but somehow we find that one last inch… make a meal stretch like never before… laugh and just BE together.

That is the Christmas of my heart.

I forgot that there were 8-10 of us on average in that first house, which would fluctuate as other people needed a place to stay, with only one bathroom. For part of the time, it was under construction, as my Dad, being the designer that he is, loved letting us live in a renovation for an extended period of time. My parents did eventually get their own bathroom but that still left 4-6 teenagers and La La and myself banging on the bathroom door! 🙂 My parents made up for it with our second house, it had 4 bathrooms and 8 bedrooms. The funny thing is… within a year of moving in there, all our older sisters and cousins got married off and moved out!

I wonder if she’s going to share about the Christmas where she decorated the tree with our older sister’s tampons…. 🙂

Great memories La La, thanks for sharing them!