I currently live in a camper in my parents backyard. Fun right? Not so much. At 30 years old, it's never fun to have to go to your parents and beg them for a place to live. Especially not with 2 kids and a small zoo. In this new blog series, The Camper Queen, I explain how we get by.

Normally, when I tell someone we live in a camper, they automatically assume it's one of those really big, nice RV type things. Sadly, I have to burst their bubble. We are talking a late 80's early 90's throwback here. One of those smallish campers that one person starts feeling claustrophobic in, much less an entire family. It's tight and cramped at the best of times.

Let me explain how we came to live in said camper. In April of 2009, I broke my ankle. At the time I worked for an animal hospital and being around dogs that were extremely rambunctious more than half the time was not such a good place to find someone with broken limbs of any kind. The break didn't occur at work, but as soon as it happened I became a liability. If I got hurt at work, they would become liable for any further medical treatment, so basically, I lost my job. Not that I could work anyways, being on crutches for almost 6 months. (My ankle refused to heal.) So, we were down to only my husband's salary, which wasn't much, to get the bills paid. Around September of 2009 it got to the point where we just couldn't afford the rent anymore, so to my parents I went, thinking we will only need to live in a camper for a few months. Yea, well, I was wrong. Here it is November of 2011 and here we still are. The economy is shot so finding a decent job is hard enough in itself, but add in not having a vehicle and I'm pretty much S.O.L. Trying to find anything to do online is even harder because either you have to pay out what you don't have to start up something online or the jobs aren't legit to start with.

We've learned to deal with it on a day to day basis. The pros of living in such a confined area is it's super easy to keep clean, I don't lose stuff nearly as often as I did before, and I always know what the kids are doing at any given time. LOL. The cons are I'm slowly being overrun by my animals. With a Ball Python and her food taking up quite a bit of space, I'm constantly trying to make room and the kids are just as horrible here about keeping their stuff put up as they were in the house we lived in before. There is almost no counter space and the stove doesn't work.

It's certainly been a trying year to say the least, but we keep managing to look up and hope for the best. Be sure to look for next week's Camper Queen post on how to manage good meals in cramped spaces with no stove.