Once upon a time, when I had four children living with me (which wasn’t long ago, since one of them is playing at my feet and the others are at youth group…), I imagined myself stealing away from the world in a desolate, off-grid location with all four homeschooled kiddos in a 600 sq ft space.
No running water and electricity required (or desired, or so I believed). I wanted the Not So Big House.
I’d have an axe. We’d forage for herbs. Naturally,we’d get a hunting license and probably eat squirrels. We’d learn to fish. My husband would drive an hour into a small town hospital…somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
So what happened with my dreams of the Not So Big House?
Stop laughing. I was serious.
I wanted the Not So Big House, but might I add the only weekend we have ever camped together was in a cabin, with running water? We had a propane burner to cook hot dogs, which took an hour.
Hot dogs! An hour!
When others talk about camping, I know what they’re talking about it, because we did it when I was a kid.
A lot. And it was fun.
Except that I discovered as an adult, it’s a LOT OF WORK.
Too much work for hot dogs.
So I’ve resigned myself to a Super 8 when I think of ‘roughing it’. (And yes, I know how that reveals the comfort I travel in.)
My idealism continues to wane as I age.
It makes it a little less fun in my head, but I am no longer nuts enough to think I could survive in a teeny cabin with adolescent daughters. As you can imagine, it’s not the provisions I’d be worried about.
Rather, our sanity.
And so therein lies my confessional. I aspire to a tiny home, resplendent with Not So Big House features. The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka has a lot to offer.
But when you come for coffee, you’ll be disappointed by my ‘not so big house’ square footage when you learn it’s bigger than my previous house and about 500 sq ft per person, ha.
A Daily Homeschool Mama Journal for You!
Introducing the Daily Homeschool Mama Journal, your perfect companion to build time for yourself! With daily journal questions, weekly planner, and self-care activities, enhance your self-awareness and explore your identity while taking care of yourself. Start practicing self-awareness today!
People also ask:
- the Not So Big House: Interior Views
- the Not So Big House: a place of one’s own
- the not so big homeschool life
- the Not So Big House: shelter around activity
- the not so big house concept: doing double duty
I hear you! I had many of the same dreams, and though I have found ways to realize parts of them, once the kids started hitting adolescence we needed more space and more separation of space. I think if we lived somewhere that the outdoors could more easily be part of our living space year-round, and if our adolescents’ interests were more suited to the outdoors, smaller homes would work. Right now I’ve got two teens and a tween coding Python on a big flat-screen TV, cozied up in front of a wood stove in the living room of our log house in the forest. A weird juxtaposition, quite representative of the hippie/geek tension in our lives.
A wood stove in the living room of a log house in a forest…coding…sounds divine, and definitely homeschool juxtaposition;) Hippie/geek tension, hilarious. We follow our interests and they can’t be stereotyped. We are who we are. I guess it means we lead distinctly interesting lives.