Red Carpet

Our first house in North Highlands was 940 square ft. It was small even when we moved there with four kids but as the years went by and the family grew it seemed to get smaller and smaller. We had three bedrooms and two of them were 10x10. By the time we had 7 children we had 5 boys and two girls and that meant toys and clothes and dressers and beds and there simply was not enough space for everything. Larry thought it would be a grand idea if we had new carpet laid and took out all the beds and made everyone a sleeping bag that they could roll up in the day time. Then they would have room to play and there would just be dressers and toys to deal with. So we got bright red carpet laid throughout the house. It was bright! The kids loved it because they felt like they could go to sleep wherever they wanted to. At first we let them, but that soon got old. In one of the first days Jay decided he wanted to take his sleeping bag into the bathroom and sleep in the bath tub! We figured he'd find out the "hard" way that that wasn't a good idea. He did! He woke up with all kinds of cricks in his body. Even a 12 year old can't take that kind of punishment.

At first I liked the idea of clean rooms all the time and since we all kept our shoes off in the house it didn't seem so bad when a child would roll off his pillow and have his face on the carpet. (something I worried about) After a while though I changed my mind. It was down right embarrassing when one of the kids got sick and had to have a blessing.

Eventually we brought the beds back and Jay who was the oldest moved out to the garage. Then we only had 4 boys in one room and two girls in the other. Much later I thought about the effect that red carpet probably had on my ADDHD kids. Live and learn I always say and isn't it true..we all do.