David’s First Birthday

David turned one yesterday. What a year! Here are a couple of videos:

Daniel’s Perspective

Daniel recently created this video about our family and some of our close friends. It is interesting. He is interesting.

First Video Game for the Budds

Our family has never owned a real video game - Nintendos, Game Cubes, X Boxes and Playstations have been requested by our children over the years, but never allowed. We always figured that they would present parenting battles for us if they were in our home. And since we are outnumbered 3 to 1 by our children, we choose our battles very carefully.

Of course, when this new system came out, our children begged for it also. But since it is a video game, we automatically said, “no”. They kept telling us how different this was from all the other games and we pretty much ignored them. Then our family was at Jesse and Jessica Sportsman’s home a couple of months ago and played with their Wii. My precious children and loving husband really enjoyed tormenting and mocking me. The fact that I actually have less electronic athletic ability than real athletic ability surprised no one. Everyone has animated stories about watching me try to catch balls in our backyard. Apparently, it is very funny.

What we did notice was how interactive this game was. It didn’t seem to promote the the ‘zoning out’ that other games tend to do. We actually liked it. So, still tentatively, we broke down and agreed to letting our children purchase it. (We have much better things to do with our money - like eat.)

Daniel (13) cleans a decent amount of carpet with his dad, gets paid for it and, for the most part, saves his money. (A Wii and an extra controller cost $300! That’s enough money to feed our family for almost a week. - Wow!) So, I took him and Daniel Smith to Best Buy this morning, stood in line (?) and waited for the store to open. He walked out of there hugging his new toy.

David is walking!

In the last week David has gone from taking a step here and there to walking all the way across the room. In a couple of days crawling will be a thing of the past for him. He is almost eleven months now and weighs a whopping 15 pounds. All of the Budd children (except Daniel) were such little things. Everyone who sees him is just amazed that such a little guy can walk. It seems normal to me - they all were pretty early walkers.

Walking, of course, will open up a whole new world for him. He will be able to reach, grab and spill everything in site. Michaela is just coming out of that stage now. (I am glad that I married a carpet cleaner!) If he is like Michaela, he will be climbing the fence in no time at all. Although, he seems to be much calmer than the average Budd child. (Elissa was my other calm child.) I have done my time with the wild ones and earned another calm child. God knows how old and tired I am. It is true, even at my age, that part of me still really does enjoy the noise and chaos. My house is full of life and it shows, all the time. But, I am not objecting if God has seen fit to give me a quiet, compliant one.

Sleeping in the tub

Five-year-olds beg to sleep in the bathtub. It is an adventure. All a child in the Buddhouse would have to do was express a passing desire and I would throw her a pillow, blanket and turn out the lights. No questions asked. This was no great feat on my part. Easy as Pie. But . . . at some point they outgrow that.

Today something miraculous happened. But let me back up. Space is a very precious thing in a house with eight people. As even our frequent guests can attest, privacy does not exist in any way, shape or form here. Since we homeschool and run a business from our home, we want to provide as much sanctuary as possible for everyone. If we are all going to be in the same house all the time, let’s at least give everyone a small little corner they can call their own.

Stina will be home for the summer in a little more than a week. We are all ecstatic about this but the question remains, “Where will we put her?”

I was planning on putting the younger ones in the same room and giving one of their rooms to Stina. She complained that the bright colors on their walls would hurt her eyes, give her headaches and she would die. (Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a bit here, but not much.) So that wasn’t optional. None of the older children wanted to bunk with a toddler either, go figure.

Daniel had already sacrificed his room on two different occasions for almost a year each when we had house guests living with us. So he was starting to whine when that looked like that was where we were heading again. Elissa gets up really early for work and is very particular about her things, so everyone is afraid to share a room with her. Stina and Sarah don’t share the same level of cleanliness and putting them together threatened to disrupt the peace in our household.

There are absolutely no more rooms in our home. Before our fifth child was born, I even put up walls in my laundry room so Daniel would have a space of his own. Sure it is only 9×10, but it is his. So I am searching out every square inch of our home, trying to find a solution - wishing for the days when they would beg to sleep in the bathtub.

And then it came to me: The closet underneath the stairs! Who could I gently convince that inhabiting this 6×3 space for his or her room was almost as fun as sleeping the the bathtub. Now, sleeping in there every night wasn’t really an option but the girls in our house have an every night slumber party anyway. (Girl talk is pretty much a 24/7 thing here and they wouldn’t dream of missing those last few moments together each evening.) I really needed a place where one girl could just put her precious belongings and have a little sanctuary.

So I picked the right moment and started in on Sarah, our twelve-year-old. After we spoke, she wanted to do all that she could to make our summer magnificent. (It does help that living with Christina is pretty much just a constant party anyway.) So she eagerly and happily agreed to move into the closet under the stairs for the summer.

The problem was. This is what it looked like:

So we spent the night getting rid of boxes and boxes of stuff that we will probably never miss anyway. As you can see, this closet had become the place that the children would stuff things instead of finding the correct place when I told them to put it away. Then Sarah chose the leftover gray paint from the bathroom (it must have reminded her of her bathtub sleeping adventures) and I painted it. I got some wood and we put up a couple of shelves and . . . this is what it looks like now.

Less junk and more room. Happy, peaceful children. Who could argue with that?