fitting in our house.

So now we have four kids. There are six of us, living in a 1,475 square foot house with three bedrooms, tiny closets, and one bathroom.

A question we get asked these days is, “Are you guys going to move?”

In fact, the week we adopted Gabe and Noah, our realtor (who’s also our friend) sent us a “Congrats!” email along with a list of 10 houses to look at. She wasn’t totally off-base; she knows that we’ve been casually looking for a bigger house ever since we started the adoption process last spring. And by “casually” I mean that we have seen pretty much every house on Zillow within a three-mile radius — some of them over and over — and have walked through a couple in person (that’s the furthest distance we’re willing to move).

It’s funny that we’ve been doing that all while investing time and money into our current house, putting down roots here and making improvements. What all of this comes down to is: we really, really don’t want to move. We’ve seen dozens of houses online and while we’ve found some with great features, nothing has come close to the precise combination of what we have here.

We love our house! We love our yard! Neither is perfect, but they’re ours. They’ve provided such a peaceful retreat and have given us many happy memories in two short years.

We really like our neighborhood and find it just the right balance of being downtown, but a couple miles north so it’s also a little quieter, with bigger yards. Our street has almost zero through-traffic, and we like all our neighbors and feel safe here. Of course our favorite feature of the neighborhood is the quick walk to David’s parents house around the corner.

When we bought this place two years ago we decided to choose a smaller house with a bigger yard (although then we weren’t planning on growing our family). We got an incredible deal on our house, so we could immediately start on improvements like fencing in our backyard, and also consider an addition in the future. Even though it seems to make sense to consider a bigger house for our growing family, it’s hard to think of losing some great things we enjoy now (travel, a monthly house cleaner) in favor of a larger mortgage payment and utilities.

So that’s where we’ve settled. Our five-year plan involves first a kitchen renovation and then a master suite addition, both of which we’re excited about. We’ve actually worked with a designer this past month and love the plans she gave us.

But none of that will happen immediately.

So that means a lot of my energy is going into making sure the six of us can fit here, right now.

I’ve been enjoying watching micro-home shows like Tiny House Nation and Tiny House Hunting. Micro-homes are all the rage right now and I think they seem so fun, but I’m realizing that it’s way sexier to daydream about living in a 400-square-foot house than to just be content in the mid-sized 1,500-2,500 square feet homes that most of us own. I watch a family downsize to a tiny house on TV but then look around our three-bedroom home and think, We can’t possibly make this work!

Well, the truth is, we can. Most of the rest of the world lives in way, way smaller homes and apartments than Americans do — and even Americans living in big cities are used to living smaller. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a big house, but there’s also nothing wrong with making a medium-sized house work for my family, if that’s what’s best for us right now.

We don’t need two bathrooms. My mom grew up in a house with six kids and one bathroom. Our two oldest kids don’t have to have their own rooms right now. I loved reading Gabrielle Stanley Blair’s book, Design Mom: How to Live with Kids. She has six children — one who just graduated from high school — and said her kids always share bedrooms, across ages, and across genders, and they do just fine.

Even so, I’ll be honest: I spent the last few weeks very frustrated about our house. The closets were bursting and bookshelves were messy and we were tripping over one another in our one tiny bathroom and most of all I could not find anywhere to put our homeschooling stuff, and I thought, We just can’t do this! We can’t all live here!

But I’ve come full circle this past week. I’ll write another post about how David and I have been purging, room by room and closet by closet, and what’s working for us. But the most important thing that helped me was to stop saying, “We can’t,” and start saying, “We can!”

It sounds silly but when you get it into your head that you absolutely can’t do something it’s very hard to be positive about the situation, whatever it may be. Just changing the words in my head turned our house into a challenge for me to overcome. And now I’m having fun with it.

So yes, we are fitting in our house just fine!