Home is Where My ♥ Is

“Home sweet motorhome”—I remember watching my mom cross-stitch this phrase around a miniature embroidered version of our little Southwind motor home--- complete with carefully-stitched rust-and-tan-colored stripes.  It was around 1993-- I was 7, and our family of five was on deputation as missionaries to the military.  Throughout the next 13 years (and four more siblings), we lived in a myriad of places—a mobile-home on a 1/2 acre lot of “the only trees in Texas” (as my dad called it), a converted Greyhound bus, a tiny apartment in California (where we were the only “gringos” in the neighborhood), a 40-foot travel trailer towed all across the country behind a fifteen-passenger van (yes, all 9 of us in one 40-ft trailer!), and others.  But they all had one thing in common-- they were all home. 

Our home from 1998 to 2001-- with its matching pull-behind van!

Much of this, I know, was due to my mom.  Wherever we lived—motorhome, rental house, apartment, or trailer—she worked to personalize it and make it ours. One of the first things she did when we bought our travel trailer was to rip out the generic geometric wall border and replace it with a border of beautiful birds and birdhouses.  Even more than that, though, it was her attitude of “wherever we are together is home”.

This attitude stuck with me when I grew up and married my own Superman in 2006. J Our new home was a three-bedroom apartment (that my hubby built with his own hands) in the church where he was (then) assistant pastor. Lots of folks asked me if I missed all the traveling, the excitement, and the adventure that comes with traversing the country as a party of 9! But I was able to truthfully answer, “No!” Though I relished every moment of the traveling life, I didn’t miss it, because my heart was in my new home.

Now nearly six years and three children later, I still feel like a little girl playing house in the world’s biggest playhouse! J I love decorating, rearranging, and personalizing my own little abode.  But the most important thing to me is that my heart—my wonderful husband, my trio of usually-sweet, always-lovable monkeys—is here.  And if someday we would be called to pack it all up and move into a tiny cardboard shack, I believe I would still be happy. As Caroline Ingalls told her husband in Little House on the Prairie, “Wherever you and the children are is home, Charles.” The goal of all my decorating and homemaking is to put a little more of my heart into my home, because home is where my heart is!