Chestnut Tree, ½ Bath –

I don’t know when they started giving special names to rooms or measured them by the number of tubs or showers. I guess it’s always been that way, the front room, dining room, family room, bedroom etc. When we were building our first house and looking at possible plans, I found out there were a lot of other names that I had never heard of, great room – just another excuse for two family rooms. Master bedroom and master bathroom – these are larger so the master of the house can relax. Guest room – well I guess you need space for those that come around once a year, not really an option for families with five kids that also need to have a study and laundry room. Pantry, this is a room to keep your food and goodies – I like having a space to have food large enough to have it’s own name. The mudroom is an interesting concept – I was taught not to bring mud into the house in the first place, now I have a room just for this purpose. With all of these extra rooms, it’s easy to see why everyone is building such big houses. The house I grew up in was half the size of the one we have now and we have half the people. Growing up we only had two bathrooms for twelve people. Well technically it was only one and half baths because the downstairs one didn’t have a tub, only a shower. When you sat on the toilet there wasn’t much more room, you could have washed your face at the same time. Our master bathroom is considered a one and a half bath because it has a separate tub and shower. Now no one uses them both at the same time, but I guess they could. The biggest problem about our house growing up was the bathroom space. I had six sisters – try finding an open bathroom in that house and then if you did get it, it wasn’t for long. Boys don’t need as long as girls, actually under the right circumstances we didn’t even need one at all. There was a chestnut tree in the back yard that occasionally came into play. It had a trunk big enough to hide behind, and take care of your business and since little boys hardly ever wash their hands in the first place we were ready to go. I guess you could have called it a half bath, bringing us back up to two. The next problem was the lack of bedrooms, forget about a guest room – don’t ever remember having a visitor overnight, if they showed up I guess we would have worried about it then. I was too young to remember my parent’s first house – two bedrooms and eight children, maybe that's when a relative showed up and said never again. They moved when I was one to a spacious mansion with five bedrooms and an additional sister on the way. This is the same house I said earlier that is half the size of my present home. There were four of us in the same room for a little while then there were three, my brother and I had bunk beds and then there was another one for our little sister on the other side of the room. Her bed was a perfect landing pad for little boys flying off the top bunk. When we got a little older and a couple of kids moved out of the house that bed was moved and we had the large room just for the two of us. The bunk beds didn’t change: they were army surplus, metal frames with wire supports under the mattress – they were never going to wear out. When you laid on them they would sag down at least a foot – which didn’t matter on the top, but on the bottom it was taking up presious space. People tell me I snore, I guess I do but I’ve never heard it. One night I went to sleep before my brother and apparently he was having a hard time getting to sleep because I was sawing logs. He got a brilliant idea, he put his feet on the sagging mattress to give me a little boost to wake me up long enough to go to sleep. Not a bad idea – except he pushed a little too hard, which I realized as I was fling thought the air on my way to the floor below. I woke up in mid flight realizing something was defiantly wrong. My brother was concerned until he realized I was Ok enough that he wouldn’t get into trouble – then he started laughing and thought it was pretty cool. I’m glad he got a kick out of it – and I’m such he fell asleep before I did