I’m not joking, our house is becoming more and more like a community creche.

From about 2:00pm until 7:00pm, we host a menagerie of kids aged between 2 and 5. For whatever reason, our house is the preferred meeting venue. It’s actually got to the stage where it’s wierd when I come home and ONLY our children are there. The place feels empty.

Lisa and I fluctuate in attitudes about it. Dealing with other people’s children can be fraught with boundary issues. How do you deal with them when they misbehave? Do you take direct action or do you tell the parents?

We’re probably the busiest people we know - no exaggeration. It sometimes get hard to deal with five, six, seven kids instead of just our own three. That’s why I call our house community creche.

Now, there’s a sneaky upside to running community creche - we get to watch our kids growing up around us 90% of the time. Sure, that involves feeding snacks and drinks to other kids a lot of the time, but our kids and their friends prefer to hang around our house. We get to hear all the funny things they say as they try to work out the world around them. We get to referree the fights and inwardly laugh at how seriously they sometimes take things. We can see the kids getting tired as their patience with each other wears thin.

Maintaining discipline takes a lot of energy. We struggled for the longest time with how to deal with other people’s kids in the house. Sometimes they would be boisterous, sometimes selfish, rude or aggressive.

After a while, we decided that they should all be treated equally. We’d treat the others as if they were our own. There’s no other way to do it if you think about it - you’ve got to be even-handed. When someone steps out of line they have to leave the room, take some time out and calm down. For our kids, if they refuse to do this, it means time in their room to think. For the adopted ones, if they refuse to settle down, they’re sent home. Not in a nasty way, but simply told “I think you need to calm down, go home for a while and come back when you feel better.”

It’s taken a while for things to reach this calm stage, but it has paid off. One of the kids (who shall remain nameless) has become so much more amiable over time and has developed a sense of humour which was initially absent.

Occassionally it’ll rub a bit whenever we’re feeling stressed and managing a household of 5-6 kids, but for the most part we’ve both learned to accept that community creche is the best way for us to watch our kids grow. It could be worse - they could prefer their friends’ houses to ours. I would really hate that!