OUR FAMILY

You get to read either the short version or the long version :)


Here's the short one:

East Coast family of 8 decide to spread their wings and live a life of adventure (mainly between Maine and Florida). Daddy (aka the Captain) is self-employed, Mommy (Sennie) is a "stay-at-home" mom who helps with Daddy's business, our teens and our two youngest are homeschooled and roadschooled. Never dull with our family of 8!

And here's the long version:



The Captain and I met in New England in the Fall of 1992. He was working on his software-company and I was working as a nanny for a Finnish family. I told him we shouldn't start dating as I was definitely going back to Finland after my year was done. Ahem. We were married in 1994.

In 1998 our family grew. A lot. Like really really really really a lot. I gave birth to quadruplets: three boys and a girl. Yep, instant family and all that.




So we have been busy since. Can't recall too much about the first year. It's a blur. The second? Yeah, that too. Then I remember the potty training years being pretty horrific. But, we have always had an amazing support network of family and friends - we would not have survived without them! So Thank You - you know who you are!!! And we did enjoy the crazy hectic first years too, took camping trips, flew to Finland a few times and loved hauling our crew anywhere and everywhere. Fun times.

Once our babies started a full day Kindergarten at a Christian school I realized it was time to have another baby :) Missy had been asking for a little sister for years by now. It didn't take too long to talk the Captain into it, and so started an adoption journey for us.

After almost two years, on our children's 8th birthday, we signed the adoption papers of Little Miss in China, and brought her home at the end of 2006 at the age of nine months.




And we were really busy again. And loving it! The big kids were still attending a Christian school, and Little Miss and I volunteered there a lot. School and hobbies kept us hopping, and during 4th grade we started considering homeschooling. I think around this time the Captain started his second company, also. Oh, and we finished remodeling our home.

I never felt the call to homeschool, and gave a good fight against it before we decided to try. We used AOP Switched-On-Schoolhouse for 5th grade, and from 6th grade on have used AOP Monarch. Overall they are both great programs, and have worked well for us. (You can read more in the Homeschooling tab.)




Homeschooling has given us the freedom to travel a lot, and we actually moved to Florida from New Hampshire in Spring 2010 without any disruptions to our school year (we kept going back to our NH home until it sold in September 2011). This blog was started to record our RV travels, but has become a family blog on all our adventures, including homeschooling.




We don't travel in our RV full time - while we enjoy all our Mothership Adventures, this mom needs some stability in our life and a homebase. At the moment we have two home states: Florida and Maine. In Florida we have been renting, and in Maine we have an old camp we renovated. We make it all work. Somehow ;-)

In 2014 we started our second adoption process from China, and brought our youngest home in August 2015. Mei Mei was a little over two at that time. She was born with cleft lip and palate, and had her palate surgery in Florida in the fall of 2015.


And in all this, in all these years, in all these challenges and changes, the Bible verse I have been clinging to is: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Philippians  4:13
Jesus Christ is our Rock, and from Him all good things come from, and without Him we would be nothing.