Living Large In Our Little House

This past week has me think­ing a lot about friend­ship. There are many ben­e­fits to liv­ing the lifestyle we do at Our Little House, but I think one of the most unex­pected is that it has helped me in har­mony with those in my life.

When I was younger, I didn’t value my friend­ships as I should. I know in some cases I wasn’t as good of a friend as I could have been. There’s been friends whom I know I’ve hurt and another who quit speak­ing to me although I never learned the rea­son. There’s been some who have hurt me. However, since mov­ing to Our Little House, I’ve learned to take life – and my friends – more at face value.

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Correna and CeeCee Marie

Some of you have emailed me to ask what we do with the Fearsome Four when we go out of town?

Well, since we have res­cues that have var­i­ous fears, we don’t like putting them in a stress­ful ken­nel situation.

We have a great pet nanny and house sit­ter who comes to Our Little House for the dura­tion of our trip.

Correna has become a very trusted and valu­able mem­ber of Our Little House community.

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My friend and blog­ging col­league, Roxanne Hawn, declared today Dog Food Action Day,  a day to pur­chase a bag of dog food (or any pet food) and take it to your local food pantry, ani­mal shel­ter or res­cue to give to a needy fam­ily for their pets.

I'm chal­len­ing my Living Large read­ers, Tweeps and other social media friends to read a story on my Rescue Me blog about how a dona­tion of dog food made a huge dif­fer­ence for one man and his 3 dogs.  I'm hop­ing I can gather 10 com­mit­ments to retweet, repost and pass the word about the campaign!

We found we have more in com­mon than our ancestry

Last week­end, we had guests at The Little House and it was awesome.

Mike’s mother, my Aunt Grace, was my mother’s best friend. His par­ents were also my Godparents, an honor in the Lutheran Church that is more than just symbolic.

We lived on the same block of post WWII bun­ga­lows and our dads worked for the same rail­road. While the neigh­bor­hood was gen­er­ally tight-knit, our fam­i­lies were even more so, vaca­tion­ing and cel­e­brat­ing mile­stones with each other.

I even learned this week­end that our fathers hand-dug the base­ment together that cre­ated the addi­tion to their lit­tle house.

After my mater­nal grand­mother died when I was a baby, Mike’s Grandma Quinn became my grandma too. And there were the cof­fee klatches, Mom and Aunt Grace could sit smok­ing cig­a­rettes, drink­ing cof­fee and talk­ing all day (Mom often recounted this is where they learned President Kennedy was shot).

Mike is four years older than me and we were both mid-life babies. Truth be known, his birth was prob­a­bly the inspi­ra­tion my mother needed to have another child when her older three chil­dren were almost raised.

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