Column: Having eight kids is great - one at a time
Well, it’s true that eight ain’t enough for a baseball team, but I had eight kids one time – one at a time that is – and not every team needs a shortstop anyway.
Even after all these years, I still mumble when someone asks me how many kids I had. Those kids multiplied into 25 and that’s not counting their spouses. People can be downright rude about big families.
Some people even asked me if I knew what was causing me to have all those kids. Well, of course, I did, by then anyway. There was a time when I didn’t.
I searched the cabbage patch on my uncle’s farm every summer until I was in junior high school and the health teacher showed “that” movie to our class. Back then, there wasn’t much a woman could do about birth control and we were a Catholic family. I was working on the star in my crown. I think I only needed to have seven children to secure that heavenly tiara, but the extra kid was loved, too.
I’m not saying my kids were accidents, and of course they didn’t come from the cabbage patch, but none of them were started in a petri dish either.
Having a large family presents all kinds of challenges and solutions are often “out of the box.” For instance, one year we put the Christmas tree and the gifts in the playpen and let the toddlers run free. Tootsie Pops were only allowed on Sunday during church and the kids could have as many as they wanted as long as they kept quiet.
One Sunday I forgot one of the kids. Realizing that we had left the baby at home alone we sped through the neighborhood in terror and were greatly relieved to find her still on the bed immobilized in her bunting like an inverted turtle.
Let the economists and journalists worry about the dynamics of raising those eight babies. I have been thinking about socks. Without factoring in the other six children, the mother in California will wash a minimum of 190,456 socks in the next 18 years. That’s two socks per kid per day per year times 18.
Speaking of socks, filling eight Christmas socks for 18 years spending just $10 per sock per year will cost $144,000. Pity the poor tooth fairy!
If those thoughts don’t give you the willies, think about their birthdays. Even if each kid only is allowed three guests, the McDonald’s around the world will stop answering their telephones and Ronald McDonald, the guy with the fancy socks, will hide in the playground. What about the birthday cake? One with eight candles or eight cakes? By the time their 10th birthday comes around, that cake would have to have 80 candles.
The logistics of a trip to the store is unimaginable. Remember when you got your two little ones stuffed into their snowsuits and their boots pulled on and their little thumbs into the mittens and one of them said, “I have to go?”
I have not mastered car seats and where could I hook up eight of them anyway?
Eight! Just think of eight anything. Eight Halloween costumes, eight room mother cookies, eight Christmas programs, eight trips to the dentist, or one trip to the dentist with eight! Eight immunizations and eight first communions, eight report cards and eight in-school detentions, eight proms and eight weddings.
My daughter-in-law plans to breed her purebred dog to raise money for her two kids’ college expenses. I’m thinking she should consider in vitro fertilization. I hear there is a doctor in California who can multiply times eight. Just think of eight times a litter of puppies!
Merriam Webster said enough was plenty and plenty is sufficient and I say I wouldn’t want eight kids at one time even if they did come from the cabbage patch.
(Carol Holoboff is a former Libby resident who now writes her column from Great Falls).