This weekend, my husband turned this: into this: Not the kid part, I mean. I do love my boys, but I would not trade my little girl for even two of them. No, my husband took a pile of lumber and turned it into some fabulous bunk beds for the boys. Our house has three bedrooms. For nine people. You may wonder well, you may wonder a lot of things. Keep em to yourself, okay? As long as this is my blog, I’ll tell you what to wonder about. Today we’re wondering why it took us so long to get bunk beds. Well, I’ll tell you: a while back, our family number reached crisis size. I mean at about four kids. That’s when you really begin to wonder, about a dozen times a day, how the heck you’re going to get through the next hour, never mind day, never mind year. You feel like your life has exploded, and every single thing about you, from the food you eat to the way you fix your hair to the way God sees you, must be radically different from 99 of Americans. It’s a terrifying, hilarious, terrifying way to live. In the teeth of the” Where did all these kids come from?” beast, when we had children ages 3, 2, and 1, I did a lot of panicked research about how to organize crowds of little ones. I hungered after one of those daycare strollers that is more or less stadium seating on wheels. I looked into double decker cribs, until I realized that, while no interior decorator, I did want to avoid that” Lab Monkey Storage” look. We checked out trundle beds, triple decker bunk beds, special rolling boards that clip to the stroller so your regressive toddler can ride along with the baby, and generally any product with extra seats, extra shelves, extra everything. What we found with most of this specialized furniture is that they are designed for a millionaires and b billionaires. At the time, we still aspired to be c thousandaires, so that was the end of that. Still, I kept chafing and yearning, convinced that the right piece of furniture would make life livable. Then we had a few more kids, and then a few more, and then the fever broke. I realized that a big family is like a small family, except louder. It’s not seven times as hard as caring for one baby. It’s harder in some ways, easier in others. You learn to double up, cut corners, be super-efficient when you can manage it, and ride out the chaos when you can’t. If you can’t tell, right now I’m riding. It’s been a long ride. If you haven’t relinquished certain anxieties by the time you have seven kids, then you must be made of stone. So many things just don’t matter anymore. One of the things that doesn’t matter is having furniture that makes sense. Apparently our life is livable, because here I am now. The one specialized piece of large family furniture we do have is a 15-passenger van, and I have been known to thank God most fervently for it when we say our nightly prayers. Other than that, we have somehow muddled by in the regular old way, tripping over each other, sometimes getting testy my daughter, the sweet little pajama’d elf in the top picture, was recently overheard threatening her big brother: ” I punch you, Jijah!”, storing things under and on top of other things, and generally just being too busy to notice how stupid our life is. We have a booster seat, a bouncy seat, an exersaucer, a Johnny Jump-up, and two port-a-cribs, one with removable bassinet. . . in the basement. Turns out what the baby really needs is a carseat for the car, and for the house, a blanket on the floor. She shares a high chair with the toddler. So upstairs, we have a foolish assortment of beds, mattresses, and convertible cribs in various states of conversion. When my husband miraculously put these bunk beds together and yes, we looked at the catalogs first, and yeah, I probably would have bought this one, or maybe even one of these if we had had the money!, it felt really good. The kids have lovely, fresh-smelling, sturdy beds and this weekend, my husband will be adding reinforcement to each post, just to be on the safe side, there is more floor space, and I even intend to store things underneath once I buy some of those special under-bed-height storage boxes ha, just kidding. It’s even made things more peaceful, because a novelty upstairs means peace and quiet downstairs. However, it hasn’t transformed our lives. It was a road we put off taking, and it hasn’t made all the difference. Time to learn that lesson one more time: in this world, you’re not going to get what you think you want until you grow and up don’t need it anymore. I do dearly love those bunk beds, but what makes me even happier is to realize that no piece of furniture exists that could make our life better than it is right now. And I’m much more thrilled about my bed-building husband than I am about the actual beds.
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