Sarah Gloudemans rarely has a slow day. In a typical eight-hour shift as a supervisor at Wendy's, she'll take customer orders, wrap sandwiches, make change and generally fix whatever needs fixing. After work, Sarah might do some grocery shopping or laundry before picking up her 2-year-old daughter, Alizah, at day care and driving to their home in downtown Concord.

Home, in their case, is a shelter.

Since August, Sarah and Alizah have spent their nights in room C3 of the Friends Emergency Shelter, a room the shelter directors call the "overflow bedroom." It's a cramped space, measuring about 8 feet by 6 feet, just large enough to hold Sarah and Alizah's winter clothes, some stuffed animals and children's storybooks. A bunk bed fills about half the room. Mother and daughter share the lower bunk, since the top one is full of down coats and other cold-weather gear.

"It's hard not to keep your head down, but it's not as bad as it seems," Sarah said on a recent evening. "It's different when you've had your own apartment, your own finances. Now I have nothing - just the relationship between me and my kid. We're in a new lifestyle now."

With a full-time job and a toddler, Sarah, 26, might seem an unlikely shelter resident. But she is part of what homeless advocates in Concord say is a worrying trend: working-class families who find themselves without permanent homes. The number of individuals and families seeking shelter in Concord has increased in recent weeks as colder weather takes hold. To help address the problem, city officials hope to

convert the former Dewey School into a temporary winter shelter for families.

"Every year, homelessness is a problem. Every winter, we're in an emergency state. But this winter is a different kind of emergency state," said Jean Tewksbury, program director at the Friends Emergency Housing Program. "We're seeing more and more middle-class, blue-collar people turning up for help. It's everyday people. We are living among them, and we don't even know it."

Despite the cramped quarters, Sarah and Alizah's living conditions are comfortable. Colorful quilts and blankets drape from the upper bunk to block drafts and create the impression of privacy.

"It's as Zen-ed out as I can get it," Sarah said.

They share a small but tidy kitchen with three other young women and their children. At 26, Sarah is the oldest in the unit by several years. In the dining room, a sign hanging on the wall reads: "The most important things in life aren't things." There's a TV room upstairs, a resource center with information about money management and job-seeking, as well as children's books and puzzles. The space is clean, warm, quiet and safe. Right now, the Friends shelter is full, with eight families totaling 24 people. One week before Thanksgiving, the residents and staff gathered for a turkey dinner. Sarah baked the lemon meringue pie.

Sarah has bold goals beyond the shelter. She imagines living in a house in the countryside near Concord one day, with a better-paying job and Alizah enrolled in private school. Most days, that vision seems a long way off.

"I know I want to do something different, but I feel trapped with the way the economy is," she said.

She briefly considered moving to Manchester in the hopes of finding a better job. But the prospect of living in a strange city with a toddler changed her mind. She recently interviewed for an office job - she can type and knows Microsoft Word - but the position required her to use a spreadsheet program that she's had little experience using. And she began a course in medical transcribing, paying $500 for the first of five classes. But she didn't have enough money to keep up with the tuition.

Sarah has held a job for pretty much all of her adult life. She described her upbringing as "chaotic," moving more than a dozen times around Concord. She attended two schools in the eighth grade and three in the ninth grade before graduating from Pembroke Academy. She said she earned decent grades and took part in extracurricular activities, such as a mock trial. She worked after school and on weekends, she said, to cover expenses like the senior class trip to Virginia and the cost of her driver's license.

Seeking a change from New Hampshire, Sarah moved to Baltimore two weeks after graduation to live with an aunt. She worked a handful of jobs - in fast food, for a school photographer, in a shipping warehouse and as a customer-service representative at a FedEx office - and began classes at a community college. But the demands of courses competed with her busy work schedule, and she dropped college altogether after a bad car accident.

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