12 Feet - Takes Up More Space Than You Realize

Over the years as our little family has grown and been added to, we've recently come to a certain realization of how much we've actually expanded. I know that society-at-large has already figured out that we have a "large" family just by the looks we got when I was pregnant with Landon. Anytime I mentioned this was not my first excursion into motherhood but my fourth, I started seeing the "crazy" looks - you know, that look that clearly tells you they think you're crazy and have you ever heard of birth control? I would expect that maybe a 5th or 6th pregnancy would warrant that kind of reaction, but I guess with 'the average family with children' consisting of 1.86 children, a 4.0 seems a bit high...and not as admired as one's GPA.

Anyway, as we have morphed into a 4-child family, we have had to rearrange our minds for all that that entails. The kind of space we take up, food we eat up, resources we use up, etc. has been a clear indication of how many more people make up this family than I am used to. Examples of this are: one pizza no longer feeds our entire family; a 1000 sq. ft. house can only hold so many beds, toys, books and baby stuff; our minivan is almost full to capacity; our crawl space storage is four times too small (thank God for friends with large barns!); four chairs plus a booster chair does not equal six around the dinner table. So the other day when I had to order two more chairs to fit around the table, it struck me how much larger my family is than I've made room for! I actually have a hard time remembering we are a six-person family. Of course, when you factor in the medical evidence of brain-shrinkage per pregnancy, I guess that's not so surprising.

I know that as the children continue to grow and become even bigger consumers, I will have to continually adjust my expectations as well as our budget. When the boys are each eating their own large pizza, I will look back fondly and remember when two pizzas were enough to feed our entire family. Such is the life of a bigger-than-average family...