Carmel Here

Hello!!! Carmel here.

Welcome to my first post. In the past my blogs have been about one specific area of my life.  This time around I am writing about everything in one place.  If you want to read about getting debt free, weight loss, marriage, foster care, adoption, parenting or dealing with chaos of life; you have come to the right place.

I am 33 years old and live in the Seattle area.  My wife, Rosie, and I have been married for 10 years.  We have been foster parents since 2009. We have foster 22 kiddos and have adopted 4.  I am sitting on about 40k of debt and about 100pds overweight.

This is a year of changes:

-          My wife, oldest daughter and I are starting weight watchers this week.  We have had much success in the past so am hoping for a positive experience again.

-          We made the hard decision of retiring from foster care this summer.  Our family will decrease from 8 to 6 permanently. I am not sure how I will maintain a clean house without the monthly social worker visits to motivate me.

-          I have been working a budget for several months now, but now it needs to go into over drive and really work on getting out of debt .

-          I am changing jobs and am hoping to do the SAHM thing for a few months to get our life on track.

-          DOWNSIZING (and I just don’t mean my butt).  We live in a huge house to accommodate our huge family, but with a new budget and smaller family size we need to downsize to smaller digs.

If you want to see how we accomplish all of this and more without falling into the pit of chaos….stay tuned.