What makes a house a home

To be completely honest with you, our house is a disaster right now. If you were to go upstairs you would need to walk on tip-toe for fear of stepping on a lego, the living room is showing evidence of recently finished art projects, and if you went into the dining room you would probably have a hard time holding a conversation for the noise level is quite high. But you know what, all the chaos makes me smile because it feels so much like a lived-in, much-loved home.

It makes me smile because the house is packed to the brim of kids with smiling faces, happy chatter, and lots of laughter. On top of the seven kids in our family, there are four cousins and three friends. If my math is accurate, that makes fourteen. And since the heat index is somewhere in the low hundreds and its much too hot to spend the day outdoors, all fourteen of those happy little people are in our house keeping themselves occupied.

To someone looking in from the outside it may look like a mess. But what I see is girls chattering away while they make necklaces; boys cheering for their favorite race car as it crashes into another and knocks it off of the Hot-Wheel track; the determined, concentrated look on the faces of the two playing checkers on the dining room table; smiling faces that are proud of the beautiful art project they just created; and the all the love that was carefully prepared and put in the oven for supper. Yes, it may be a little messy, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the family, the friends, and the fellowship.

This is what makes a house a home.