Clarification

Just a quick post-script to yesterday’s post.

I mentioned that after Kay leaves we’ll probably be alone in the house for “a VERY LONG TIME.” And I realized that the TN Fritz kids could misinterpret that, since we haven’t invited them over to stay for a week this year like we did last year.

To clarify, if we could have the kids here, even right now with so many other people in the house and the craziness that’s happening, we would. We absolutely would love to have them. Unfortunately, we have a very small apartment right now and having four people in it for the last two weeks has been challenging enough; I don’t think anyone would have had fun if we tried to cram in 3 rambunctious kids.

But even when it’s down to three people, I don’t think it would be wise to invite the kids over. Kay has a lot of anger toward the church and one heck of a potty mouth and I don’t want to expose kids to who love Jesus as much as my brother’s kids do to someone who’s that angry toward God. Plus, she’s not a very good example for kids and I don’t want them exposed to that. And I don’t want them exposed to how frustrated Justin and I get toward her. (I feel bad enough exposing adults to our frustration.)

When she leaves at the end of July (56 days), there would be time in between then and when school starts up again, but we won’t have any money. So we’d have the space again and the mental capacity to have the kids here, but we wouldn’t have any money to take them to the water park or anything fun. And, yeah, it’s not necessary to do expensive things, but it’s FUN and we’d rather be able to have a certain amount of money set aside for their visit to go places and buy things. This spring was much more expensive than expected, putting us seriously behind on our debt-freedom plan, and we don’t have that money set aside right now.

So, as much as we really would love to have the kids again this year, I don’t think it’s going to be possible. But it’s absolutely not because we don’t want to have them. We had an awesome time visiting with them last summer and we DEFINITELY want to do that again. It’s just an unusual spring/summer for us and we’re not going to be able to do it.

Now, we absolutely WILL NOT be inviting in another person to be a roommate again, possibly ever.

But that’s TOTALLY different from having kids who I love (and who I love to spoil) coming to visit. Someday, I want to have space enough for ALL the nieces and nephews to come and visit all at the same time and make like a big ol’ summer camp out of it or something. We’ll have them help feed the goats and ducks and collect eggs from the chickens and let them go wandering around in the woods and hang out in the hay loft and that kind of thing. We just have to figure out how to make it happen in the next handful of years before the kids get too old. And until we have the farm, they’ll just have to hang out in our little bitty apartment and go out for adventures at the beach and other places around here. And, very sadly, we won’t be able to make it happen this year.

But next year? Next summer is going to be awesome.