How Do You...

As parents of 13 children, the one question that we get the most is "How do you do it?"  The question comes in many forms.  People might ask "How do you keep them from fighting all the time?", or "How do you afford the groceries?", or "How do you keep up with the laundry?".  The most common version of the question goes, "I don't know how you do it, I only have two and I feel like I'm going crazy".  Over the next few posts, I plan to answer some of the "How do you..." questions that we get asked the most.  Hopefully Esther will even chime in with a post or two explaining some of the things that she has had to do, and stop doing, in order to survive and maintain her sanity with 13 kids.  OK, the fact that she chose to have 13 kids is a pretty good indicator that there wasn't necessarily a lot of sanity to hang on to in the first place.

"I don't know how you do it. I only have two kids and I feel like I'm going crazy"

 This seems to be the most common statement people make when they first learn that we are a single family and not a Walmart flash mob. Usually this question is given immediately after realizing that as we wait in line to check out at a store, for the most part, all 13 of our children are managing to refrain from begging for candy, climbing the display shelving, punching each other, or screaming.  Most people overlook the fact that the Dad is doing all of these things.  The interested party looks at Esther and notices that she doesn't look harried, she isn't mumbling to herself or twitching, and most surprisingly, Esther doesn't have an 80s mullet or a floor length, home-made dress (not to mention the fact that her husband has the energy to beg, climb displays, punch, and scream).  In short, we look normal.  Esther and I can actually see all of the calculations taking place in someones mind as they assess us.  We've been through the conversation enough that we could script it.  Every conversation born of the initial shock that we are a family of 15 contains some combination of the following statements, always culminating in the question above.

(to Esther) "Have you had them all?"

(to me) evil glares when Esther says that yes she has, in fact, had them all.  I guess people assume that I am one of those bullies in the swimming pool who push you back under water as soon as you surface for breath, only in my world, I hurry up and get Esther pregnant before she has had a chance to catch her breath from the last birth.  Wait, actually that's pretty much exactly how it happens.


(to both of us)  "You look too young to have that many kids"  This is my favorite statement of this conversation and I usually tell the giver that I love them very, very much.


(to Esther)  "You look so good.  Holy Cow, I've only had two and I still haven't gotten my figure back"  I usually get a pitying look at this point.  I assume it is because I struggle to lose all of the "baby weight".


(to me)  "You must have a good job"

(to both of us)  "How big is your house?"


And once the questioner has concluded that we aren't drooling (much) and we aren't going to burst out in a chorus of "This is the Day the Lord has Made" in Walmart, and we aren't going to have a nervous break down in the check out line, they ask the question.  "How do you do it?  I only have the two, and I feel like I'm going crazy."

So how do we do it?  First let me start with the main presumptions that this question makes, namely, that we have things under control.  We have never chosen to have another child because the one(s) we have are simply too easy.  Never have we sat around in the evening and discussed how disappointed we are that parenting hasn't turned out to be the radically out of control, confusing, frustrating, exhausting experience that we were promised in the brochure.  Never have I said, "Babe, this is too easy.  Parenting is supposed to be a struggle to maintain your sanity.  I guess we better add one more kid to the house so we can be out of control like we are supposed to be."  In truth, if you have two kids and you feel out control, please know, when we had two kids, we felt out of control.  When we had three kids, still out of control.  At seven kids, we had gained virtually no control at all.  At nine kids, we were really loosing it.  Now at 13 kids, I'm proud to say, we are still completely out of control.  So if you have one kids, three kids, 10 kids, or 20 kids, parenting is about juggling chain saws, and it always feels out of control.


Having made clear the fact that we are just as out of control as everyone else, let me share with you how we manage to maintain what little control we do have over our super sized family. Benadryl.  Give each child over the age of two a double dose of Maximum Strength Benadryl with every meal, and your life is mostly about keeping everyone covered up as they sleep.  It is a truly peaceful life.  I wish it were that easy.  Honestly though, I would have to say the number one tool that we have relied on to make our family work is planning ahead.  Of course we haven't always succeeded at this, but as much as possible, we have always tried to stay at least one step ahead of whatever predictable life changes come into our family.  For most people, this comes naturally with baby number one.  The Mom-to-be finds out she's pregnant and suddenly, the timer is ticking.  You only have eight or nine months to create a nursery in your house, get all the baby paraphernalia necessary to house an infant, and get your butt back in church, because suddenly a conservative lifestyle looks more appealing than it ever has before.  With our first child, we all seem to feel like a nine month gestation period is evidence of God's omniscient wisdom.  He knew that we'd need time to prepare.  God could have made us like mogwai where all you have to do is put water on us and extra little mogwai come popping out of our fur (if you don't understand this reference, you are not an 80's child.  Please refer to the movie Gremlins.).  Thankfully we are not mogwai.  God gave us time to prepare for that first baby.  Unfortunately, we often tend to question God's wisdom in creating a nine month baking time as we prepare for baby number two.  When we experience the absurdity of a woman , swollen with baby to the point of looking utterly unnatural, chasing a toddler around Walmart, the nine months of prep time starts to look more like a nine month prison sentence.  The nursery is already here, most of the paraphernalia is reusable, and for the most part, you have become a faithful Sunday morning church-goer (the free nursery while you nap though a 45 minute sermon ROCKS!).  Is waiting nine months really logical?

We have found that a little imagination is priceless here.  For instance, if you are having baby number two, imagine what you are going to do with baby number one when you are feeding the new addition.  What will baby number one be doing?  What would you rather he/she be doing.  If you don't want baby number one to be unraveling six rolls of toilet paper then forcing the entire wad of paper into the toilet, then you have eight or nine months to train him/her to do something else while you are occupied.  If the newborn's car seat is going to have to sit in the shopping cart and older bro/sis is going to have to walk along side you in the store, you have eight or nine months to teach this new skill (unless Clothes Rack Hide-N-Seek with a toddler is fun for you).  If you are adding baby number three, how will you handle the fact that the children now outnumber the adults?  Many great nations have fallen throughout history because they didn't see this simple bit of mathematics sneaking up on them.  How will you handle the fact that Mom now has more kids than arms?  or lap?  Believe me, with a little imagination, you will find more stuff to prepare for than you could ever squeeze into nine months.

This continues throughout child rearing.  How are we going to handle outside influences when the kids go to school?  How will we handle dating?  How do we handle the fact that jokes, movies, music, and general conversation grow more mature as the kids get older, but you may still have little ones in the house that need the same protection and discretion that you gave the older ones at that age?  Of course you can't prepare for everything.  You will miss some things.  I recently slammed into a scenario that I hadn't prepared for.  It slipped though my attempts to prepare for the future.  I hadn't imagined the strain and frustration that my third and forth sons would feel as my first and second transitioned into young adulthood.  I made the mistake of feeling like we managed the teen years pretty well with Josiah and Matthew, so a similar approach with Elijah and Joshua should work fine.  What I failed to account for was that when Josiah and Matthew were 14-16, they didn't have two older brothers who were gaining new freedoms and levels of trust than before.  When Josiah and Matthew were 14-16 and their lives were consumed with being Dad's personal slaves, they knew nothing else.  They had nothing to compare their lot in life to.  Elijah and Joshua, as they contemplate their lot in life, can look at Josiah and Matthew and say, "That looks way more fun than the personal slave business."  I hadn't prepared for this, and now I'm playing catch up.  But, for the most part, we have relied heavily on Imaginative Planning.

I wish I could say that thinking ahead and planning accordingly is the one and only thing that it takes to have a successful parenting experience, as if that really exists.  There is more.  Raising mini-sinners in a broken world takes more that just good planning, but that will have to be for a later post.