Finding a Quiet Place

13 hours a day their voices ring out in my home.  And much as I love it, sometimes it is my ears that are ringing long after they've gone to bed.  In this little house with no playroom, no basement retreat, in the dead of winter when the best I can hope for is 15 minutes of peace when I send them outside - where can I find a quiet place?

We live and work and learn and play in a giant jumble in two rooms - a small living room and dining room.  Here is where I serve three meals, fold three loads of laundry, school little ones, sew, get computer work done.  Here is also where they whoop and holler, color, sing, dress up, play, shout, fight and argue.  We are on top of each other.

In many ways, I love it.  I love having a small home to keep up, because I am hardly keeping up.  I love being an arm's length from any child at any given time, able to intervene right away, correct, protect and mother effectively right where I am.

And yet still, I have that longing for a little place all my own.  It doesn't have to be big, a closet would do, someplace small and quiet and mine  - how lovely would that be?

As long as we live here - which will be awhile yet, it doesn't seem like it will happen.  So I try to get up a bit earlier and snatch some silence from the morning.  And I sit here and blog my thoughts next to a 3 year old with similar concentration, dressed in full ballerina regalia, coloring a princess.

Taking my quiet wherever I can find it.