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Large Family, Little House: The Mud Room and Kitchen

Dave Ramsey Living, Family, Large Family Life, organization, Uncategorized By 11/07/2016 No Comments

I had a stay-at-home mom for most of my childhood and adolescence.  I don’t have any memories of our house being messy or the sink being full of dishes.  I don’t really recall my mom doing laundry, yet my laundry was always washed and returned to my room after school each day.  As a result, I waltzed into marriage with no clue what I was doing.  I didn’t really know how to cook and I had no idea how to manage a household:  cleaning, laundry, maintenance, tips and tricks, nothing.  Now I will say that I was always a neat and tidy kid and teenager.  I enjoyed keeping my room clean and I regularly rearranged the furniture in my room completely by myself…which could explain some of my current back issues. lol!  But as far as logistics, methods, and skills, particularly in the kitchen–I had nothing.

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Large Family, Little House

children, Dave Ramsey Living, Family, Homestead, Large Family Life, organization, Uncategorized By 11/02/2016 No Comments

Hi!  Thanks for stopping by! I’m excited to give you a glimpse into our daily life.  Large families seem to be a bit of a mystery to some people.  I get questions like, How do you do it all?  Do you have a big house?  What do you drive?  How many bedrooms do you have?  Are you super organized? So I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce myself to those of you who are new around here and give you a tour of our three bedroom trailer, affectionately called the Meadow Cottage, and share how we live comfortably as a large family in a little house.

A Little History

I’m Audrey and I’ve been married to my web developer husband, Josh for almost 15 years.  We have four biological sons, one biological daughter, and three adopted daughters from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They range in age from 4 months to 13.  Two years ago we only had three sons and were in the process of adopting three sisters from DRC.  At the tail end of our adoption we were shocked to discover we were pregnant after seven years of infertility–Annie was born August 6, 2014.  In October 2015 God confirmed to us that our years of infertility were indeed over as we found out we were expecting baby number eight.

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Food Budget Reform

Uncategorized By 06/03/2016 No Comments

Many years ago I had the privilege of meeting Mary Ostyn from Owl Haven, at a Created  for Care retreat.  She’s a lovely lady, fellow adoptive mom, and mother of ten.  I read her book A Sane Woman’s Guide To Raising a Large Family while we were in Africa getting ready to bring the girls home.  I had been eye-balling her money-saving cookbook for years but never took the plunge until recently when I received an email from a friend who is expecting baby number seven just a couple of months behind me.

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Our Beautiful New Reality

Uncategorized By 09/04/2015 No Comments

I’ve been blogging in my mind for weeks now.  About a month and a half ago I began to feel myself coming out of the fog.  It was a familiar place in which I lived for about four months after the girls came home.  You see, we packed up and sold our house of almost ten years less than a month before our girls came home.  We downsized from our 2,000 square foot brick ranch to a mobile home.  We have some dear friends who have a large farm and are letting us live in a double wide on their property rent-free while we get out of debt.  Our adoption put enormous financial stress on us over the past three years and we have a lot of debt to pay off.  Most of it was accumulated before we began our adoption, but needless to say, nothing got paid off over the last three years and then we acquired more during our trip to bring the girls home.

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Geography Flashcards

Uncategorized By 06/29/2015 No Comments

This is an updated post related to my geography cards.  I have created geography flashcards to correspond with all three cycles of CC but only the PDF download of each set is available at this time.  I have seven children, including a baby, and simply don’t have time to devote to making and shipping completed sets at this time.

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