CURRENT MISSION

To occasionally escape from our Brady Bunch family for some couple "together" time - when we can find places to stash our 7 kids!

ABOUT ME

Joel and I live in the Finger Lakes region of NY, out in the country, surrounded by cornfields, just the way we like it. Although the more we travel south for our annual treks on the Appalachian Trail, the more our love for the mountains grows, and perhaps we'll retire to some little cabin on a mountain-side in a few years. We are a combined family that makes people do a double-take - I had 4 kids and he had 4 kids, all of which lived with us full-time and then we combined them in 2002. Since then one's gone off to college, the army and gotten married, so now when people ask that question, "How many kids do you have?" we answer just the non-married, still-list-our-address-as-theirs ones. Which is 7. One's a freshman in college this year 3 hours away and the next is headed off in a few months. Then we'll be down to 5 kids in the house. The ages now range from 11-23 for the oldest. As you could imagine, this makes us pretty laid-back (or else we'd go NUTS!) and poor (we do lots of FREE, fun family activities, which is partly how we got so into hiking, camping, backpacking etc. We are both non-smokers and only social drinkers, and like animals. We also have 3 cats and a very mentally-challenged dog.

PHILOSOPHY

Being responsible for 7 kids on a daily basis, we tend to live our life day to day, and to pick our battles. I think we tend to enjoy and appreciate the little things (like 10 minutes of alone time) more than others, and our goal is always to make more from less. We support our family on my husband's one income, so one of my goals is to make that money go as far as it can, without making the kids feel too deprived. I feel like I've taught them life skills of managing money and how they think about money that they will hopefully take with them to their adult families. We live and teach acceptance and non-judgment, and one of our kids is autistic so I feel like the family tries to teach and educate the "outside world" on a daily basis about their possible preconceptions about people with special needs. Basically, we try hard to keep a positive energy amidst the sometimes-chaos.

Pourquoi je suis sur Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Right now at this point, my husband and I are only able to plan very occasional escapes for 2 far enough to necessitate needing a couch. But - the kids are all growing up.... we are about to send our third out of eight "kids" (we say seven now since once they get married, we omit them from the kid count for practical purposes lol) off to college, and we can see that things will be changing around here pretty rapidly over the next few years. We have stayed at plenty of hostels while backpacking (US ones which I understand are of a different variety than overseas ones) and have found we enjoy the general idea of getting to know different kids of people in a different way than we normally would!

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

None so far officially, but as I said above, while on our backpacking adventures on the AT, we semi-occasionally stay at hiker hostels, which seems to be a similar idea/feeling. Once we get a few more kids off to college, we will have some room and be willing to host, although out here in the middle of the boonies, not exactly sure we'll get lots of takers! But we love it here.

Centres d'intérêt

Backpacking, reading, camping, geocaching, programming, technology, lifehacking, family stuff, deal finding...

• animals
• cats
• dogs
• technology
• reading
• traveling
• hiking
• backpacking
• camping
• lakes
• mountains

Morceaux de musique, films et livres

I love to read, hubby not as much. He reads code all day. He likes to look at pictures, is more visual. We both love a large variety of music, most of the gamut. I listen to Sirius AltNation the most if that means anything to anyone (CAKE, Foo Fighters two of my fav groups) and he leans more towards techno music for his daily commute. But then at home we crank anything from Brainbug to Jack Johnson to David Allen Coe to the Beatles to Foo Fighters to CAKE to Prodigy to Perfect Circle to Eminem to Garth Brooks to Little Bigtown to... etc.

Une aventure extraordinaire que j'ai vécue

Hiking the AT for 9 years, we have seen many amazing sights and accomplished things we might not have thought possible if you asked us! You never know what's around the corner on the trail... besides another white blaze!