Public Bathrooms

The sign I dream of.

Knock, knock, knock.

“You have got to be kidding,” I thought.

I had just stepped out of the shower when someone knocked on the bathroom door.

Now, I only spend 15-20 minutes a day in the master bathroom, which is less than 1.5% of the day. Since my children spend even less time in the master bath than I do, one might think that we never cross paths there.

And yet somehow the probability of someone knocking on the bath door (or just coming in) during the 1.5% of the day that I am there is nearly 100%.

Even on a day like today when I was taking a shower during an off-peak time. It was well after the morning rush hour of teeth brushing and it was not even during the evening rush hour with the kids’ showers.

How in the world does someone need to come into the master bath at 11:15am on a Saturday morning?

“Who is it?” I asked with poorly veiled irritation.

“It is Anna,” came the reply. “I need to empty the trash.”

I can’t wait until we get to Kenya where we will have half of the bathrooms that we have now.  I guess I will just have to go with this sign on my bathroom door.

Basement Living

by Miss Bookworm

Living in a basement - even a nicely furnished basement - with a family of nine was a squeeze. A tight squeeze. When we decided to rent a basement to live in for a few weeks while attending a conference (about Third Culture Kids) in New York, we knew that it might be tight. But I think we all would agree that the biggest problem was the bathroom. The single bathroom. The one and only bathroom. Every morning when it came time to brush teeth, the result was usually about four people stuffed inside the bathroom brushing their teeth with several more outside of the bathroom door clamoring for the ones inside to hurry up and finish because we had to leave in five minutes.

Aside from the “one bathroom” problem, another struggle was the beds. There were only four, and while we had brought air mattresses in anticipation of this problem, two of them ended up having holes. In Dad’s spare time, he either worked on fixing the air mattresses (to no avail) or he did work on his laptop (to slightly better results). Each night everyone would go to sleep on nicely pressurized beds (freshly pumped up), and each morning at least two would be flattened to the extent that their occupants were essentially lying on the ground.

Now, you can decide which is more uncomfortable - the situation with the beds or the fact that we ate all of our meals at two different tables. One table was pretty normal, but it only seated four. The other was a coffee table and the seating required two people to sit on the couch and three to sit on some tripod lawn chairs that we had (thankfully!) brought along.

Oh well, the point of our stay in NY was not to be living in extreme comfort. On the contrary, we were all too busy widening our perspectives to spend much time in the basement anyway. It was a fun two weeks, and we all learned a bunch.

Bench Captains

Bicker, bicker, bicker. And them some more bickering.

I was getting in the van a couple of Sundays ago and the kids were bickering about who should sit where. For some reason, when we hop in the car with four or fewer kids, there never seems to be a problem. But when all seven are there, things often don’t go well.

Tired of these frequent life-is-unfair-if-I-have-to-sit-here events, I spent that drive trying to come up with a new “system for success.” (One of my favorite things to do as a father of a big family is to try to come up with a “system for success” that makes a problem go away. You may recall the shoe bins, for example.)

After hearing the kids voice their preferences/complaints, the “system for success” struck me – bench captains. Here are the new rules for engagement for child van loading.

The three oldest kids are bench captains who are in charge of the bench that they are currently sitting in. Each bench captain has assigned to them one younger child who is a permanent part of their team. Every time we get into the van, the teams rotate benches. If a younger child has an issue/question about where someone is sitting, they may only talk to their bench captain about it. The bench captains can confer about things as needed, but the only time an issue goes to the car captain (a.k.a. Dad) is when the bench captains can’t agree. (I am happy to report that no appeals have been made to the car captain yet.)

This is the gist of it, although there are several other minor rules such as “If you arrive at the van and think that someone is in your seat, don’t get in the van and tell them. Rather, wait for your bench captain to arrive and make your appeal to them.” Or, on the more technical side, there is this beauty of a rule: “Due to the fact that Anna sits in a car seat in the middle bench making things a little tight, any small child whose current turn is the middle bench can exercise their option to sit in the back bench instead. Exercising this option does not count as their ‘turn’ in the back, and therefore will result in them sitting in the back bench twice in a row.”

Last Sunday we all got in the car and I turned to CrazyMom and said, “Did you notice that?”

“Notice what?” she asked.

“We just got in the car and there was not a single comment about where anybody was sitting.”

Needless to say, I am in love with my bench captains.

P.S. Now, for all of you who think that we are short circuiting the learning process by putting in place rules to follow rather than teaching our kids how to act upon underlying principles such as thinking of others before thinking of yourself, you are right. However, in my defense I would like to point out that with seven kids in my home, I have approximately 253 other opportunities per day to teach principle-based conduct. Besides, I think the only lesson that they were learning from my “teaching” before was “Gee, Dad can get mad really fast when we are getting in the car.”

Camping Memories

The launch to our trip was just as stressful as the "pre-camping memories" with the chainsaw and the blocked traffic.  When we set off, I quickly realized that the trailer brakes were not working.  Stopping on a hot blacktop parking lot, I tried to fix them, but to no avail.  Since we had sturdy brakes on the van, we decided to press on.  About every 20 minutes or so I would have another idea of what could be wrong with the brakes and I would pull over and try something else.  My roadside trouble shooting came to an end, however, when I shorted out the lights on the trailer.  I realized that if I did not stop trying to fix the brakes soon, I was likely to set the thing on fire - possibly on purpose.  Luckily we were close to the campsite by this point and were able to make it there safely.  A trip to Advanced Auto Parts and a new fuse #17 saved the day and the rest of the trip was great. 

The Joy of Big Family Games

“So what are some of the challenges of having a big family?” the woman on the other end of the phone was asking me. I was surprised that what flooded my mind was the good things about big family life. I stammered around and finally said, “Shoes. They are everywhere.”

Lame. I know.

But it made me wonder what the kids would say about what they did not like about big family life, so the next morning I asked them. They, too, had a similar response and started talking about the good stuff. Every one of them said the same thing for the best thing about having a big family.

So what is the best thing about big family life?

Playing games.

When I probed a little further, what I discovered was that it was not just being able to play any game, but games that require multiple kids – ball freeze tag, four square, dodge ball, soccer, and knockout. These are the types of games that many kids only get to play at recess but big family kids can play all night long.

So, when you are thinking about whether or not to adopt a child (or another child), just remember that the joy of big family games may just be a child away.

CrazyMom is in the Kitchen

It is a typical Saturday night in our house with CrazyMom out in the kitchen preparing Sunday lunch and me back in my office “working.” I often think that we should just eat out after church so CrazyMom does not have to cook on Saturday nights, but that is just because I am ignorant of the cost difference. Take, for example, the Sunday meal that CrazyMom served the family a few weeks back.

“So, how much did this meal cost?” I asked when we sat down, thinking the number could be large and it might have just been easier to eat out.

After a moment of doing some mental math, CrazyMom said, “About $8.”

Eight dollars? I was stunned. Never again will I suggest the lazy path of eating out.

By the way, here is the breakdown of the cost of the meal:
$2.50 for the 1/4 of the ginormous turkey CrazyMom bought on sale at Thanksgiving.
$0.00 for the potatoes from the garden of CrazyMom’s brother.
$2.00 for the stuffing
$0.00 for the gravy - thank you Mr. Turkey
$2.00 for the broccoli
$1.50 for 2/3 of a gallon of milk

What Broke Today?

“What broke today?” is what I ought to say when I walk in the door from work. I think that would be better for my emotional state than walking in, dropping my bag, and collapsing in a chair just to have CrazyMom or one of the kids then come to rouse me to go fix what broke that day.

Note: We do not have destructive kids. It is just that most of our owner manuals say, “Not intended for commercial use.”

After arriving home late last night due to parent conferences, CrazyMom informed me that the dryer broke that day. In a house of nine, this gets classified as a code orange emergency. Longing to go to bed, I dragged myself into the laundry room just to find that none of the routine checks fixed the dryer. Unlucky there.

Google led me to open up the back of the unit to look for the most likely culprit – the thermal fuse. My cynical Google friends were right that the fuse had been hidden from me in order to try to get me to call service for a $10 part. Depressed, I headed for bed.

On my way to bed I passed through the kitchen. “Honey, the faucet on the kitchen sink . . . “ CrazyMom trailed off when she saw the look in my eyes. “I suppose this is not a good time to bring that up, huh?”

Tonight, after being broken for 24 hours and no part ordered yet, CrazyMom reclassified the dryer as a code red emergency. Dreaming of an easy fix, I decided to check the power to the unit. The dryer was spinning but not drying, but still, just one leg of the 220 could be down. I would have missed the problem if it were not for Miss Bookworm who was under the impression that I needed a flashlight. As she shined the flashlight on the socket I could see into the holes and noticed that something did not look quite right. Upon further inspection, this is what I found.

How does the back break out of the socket in the wall when nobody has touched the plug in over a year? Well, it just does.

Now, about that faucet . . .

Four Square Mania

There are lots of advantages to having a large family - like being able to run two grids when you step outside to the driveway to play four square.  Over thanksgiving break, we had a lot of four-square fun by having one square be the top division (or the pros) and the other be the lower division (or the minors).  When someone lost in the pro square, he or she went all the way back to the lowest spot in the minors and the person in the top spot in the minors got called up to the pros.  You will see in the video how Anna rides a hot streak all the way to the top.  Go Anna!

Haste Makes Waste

“Um, Hi.” It was CrazyMom on the phone and I could tell that something was not right. I was driving home from F.G. and Buddy’s soccer game with five kids and two grandparents in the car. CrazyMom had beaten me home from a soccer practice and was supposed to be getting dinner on the table.

“You know how GranpaF said he wanted to buy dinner. Maybe you should go ahead and do that,” she said.

That morning we had been in Hocking Hills camping with GrandmaF and GrandpaF. We made it back to our house with 1 hour to spare before we had to head out to a soccer game and a practice. GrandpaF had offered to buy dinner after the game to make things easier, but CrazyMom and I thought we would be able to get the kids to bed earlier after our big weekend if we ate at home.

So in that 60 minutes of unpacking, taking showers, and getting the kids in uniforms we added into the mix cooking dinner. Everything was going according to plan until CrazyMom got home with the two girls from practice to find the house full of smoke. It turns out that a burner had been left on under dinner, on high.

After several days with all of the windows open day and night, we finally called our insurance company. After days and days of professional cleaning, the smell has subsided and we are optimistic that by the time all the work is completed, the smell will be gone.

Oh yeah. Turning the burner off was not the only thing we forgot to do that fateful night. We also forgot that K.D. and LittleFoot had a soccer game in addition to F.G. and Buddy’s game. Oh, well. I guess you can’t remember everything.

The Breaking of Bathroom Use Policies

“Why don’t you take a little rest when you go up to change?” suggested CrazyMom. I had just gotten home from work last night (Friday) and it had been a long week for me. CrazyMom knew I was dog-tired and, as always, was looking out for me.

So I did.

Well, the rejuvenated me then stayed up too late. But I knew that I would be able to sleep in on Saturday morning because the first of three soccer games was not until 9am (sleeping in is a relative term, I know).

Because of our big family we have certain fair use policies about when and under what circumstances certain bathrooms can be used. I would like to note that these policies state that if a child has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, our master bath is off limits.

But rules are meant to be broken.

When K.D. needed to make a run to the bathroom this morning at 6am, the kids’ bathroom was already in use – yes, we have lines for the bathroom even before it is time for the kids to get up. He hung out as long as he could, but then the situation went to code red. According to policy, the next bathroom that should be investigated for availability is down on the main floor, but since the situation was now critical, K.D. burst into our room. So much for sleeping in.

While I am excited about our upcoming move to Kenya to teach, it is moments like these that make me think about some of the lifestyle changes that lie ahead for us – like moving from a home with four toilets to a home with two. Maybe we should also sign up to be dorm parents. Surely there would be more bathrooms in a dorm.

Winning First Dibs on the Leftovers

Ah, the leftover meal. We pull everything out of the fridge, line it up on the counter, fix plates like short order cooks, and then pop them one-by-one into the microwave. There are two main issues that we face in this whole process. The first is that if you heat a plate in the microwave for 90 seconds, then by the time the 7th kid’s plate goes into the microwave, so much time has already passed that the first kid is already back in line waiting to have another plate of food warmed. This can make for an experience worse then cooking.

But that is not the real issue. The real issue is that the kids who are first through the line take all of the good stuff much to the dismay of the kids later in the line. So CrazyMom solved the problem tonight by having a drawing. Yes, the kids drew numbers from a hat to see the order in which they would go through the line.

And the winner was . . . Buddy. Here is Buddy with a plate full of the best of the leftovers.

Lame Tooth Fairy

"Hey, Anna! Did the Tooth Fairy come last night?" Buddy just asked Anna at breakfast.

"No," replied Anna. "The Tooth Fairy sometimes takes two days to come."

Yes, Anna lost a tooth last night. Yes, she put it under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Yes, we forgot about it.

Maybe the Tooth Fairy will be able to remember tonight. But if the Tooth Fairy forgets again, at least Anna understands how things work in large families.

Yes, We’ve Got Problems

When I sat down in church today, a 5-year-old girl I knew was sitting in the pew in front of me.

“Hi! How are you?” I asked.

“I fell on my scooter yesterday and I got these,” she replied pointing to her legs that were stretched out in front of her on the pew. Visible through her white tights were two band aids on her left knee and one on her right.

“Band aids! Oh, my! Were you bleeding?”

“Yes, and I also got this,” she said as she held out her arm to show another scratch on her wrist like it was a trophy.

“That looks pretty bad. Was your mom watching you when you were scootering?” I asked. Of course, I already knew the answer. I know how large families work and she was the youngest of four kids.

“No, she wasn’t there!”

“How about your dad? Was he watching you while you were scootering?” I was focusing hard to keep a straight face.

“No, he wasn’t there either.”

“So neither of your parents was there?”

“No, and I had to go inside to get them and it hurt because I had to bend my knees.”

“Well, let me tell you something. We had a scootering accident at our house yesterday and there were not any parents outside either,” I confided.

“Really!” she said in a totally shocked voice. “You guys have the same problems we do?”

I nearly lost it. “Yes, we have the same problems you do.”

Breakfast Time-Lapse Video

I am obviously on a video kick right now. My place of employment issued me a new MacBook Pro this year and I have been playing around with iMovie, Garage Band, and the like. Here is a time-lapse video of our family having breakfast last Saturday morning.



A special thanks to one of my students, Brad, who tipped me off on how to hack my small Canon Powershot camera so I could program it to automatically take a photo every 5 seconds. This saved me from having to go out and buy an intervalometer.

Needed: Nurse’s Clipboard and Second Thermometer

“Hi, hon,” I said. I was calling CrazyMom on my way home from work on Monday to let her know that which she already knew – I was running late. I was expecting her to start reminding me about how I only had 11 minutes before I had to leave for the soccer fields.

“I have four kids with fevers in the house,” she said.

“Four kids? How can that be?”

I was incredulous because this fact went against my understanding of how this world should be dealing with us. It all started a few weeks ago when the first kid got sick. We were pretty much processing the kids sequentially – when one kid would recover, the next kid, who was secretly incubating, would go down.

On Sunday CrazyMom was not with me at church because she was home with a child who was nearly recovered and another child who was the latest casualty. I remember telling others that we were basically out of the woods now. We were running out of kids to get sick, so the end was near.

Well, I was wrong. Now it was Monday evening and kids who had recovered were relapsing.

When I got up this morning and came down for breakfast, only two kids were up and able to make it to the breakfast table. It sure made for a quiet breakfast.

Later in the day, I got an email from CrazyMom giving me the current medical status of each child at home. At the end of the message she wrote:

“I need a nurse’s clipboard and a second thermometer.”

Who Dunnit?

There are a lot of great things about having a large family, but one thing that drives me nuts is how difficult it is to figure out who dunnit.

For example, we have an intermittent toilet flusher in our home. It does not take a rocket scientist to determine who did not flush the toilet in a single-child family, but in larger families finding culprits can be a challenge. The other day I found an unflushed toilet and with minimal investigation I was able to determine the gender of the culprit. Marching into the room where the three boys were playing, I started my FBI-approved child interrogation techniques. They all denied that they had dunnit and would have implicated another brother if given the opportunity. Now it is a little harsh to say that one of my boys was lying. Whoever dunnit probably thinks that they did actually flush the toilet which is why they can so convincingly say that they are innocent and pass my internal lie detector test.

It is not just the boys, however. My mother has made for the girls bunches of these decorative hair doohickeys. Now Anna normally wears them but the other girls will sometimes use them as well. I guess the idea is that you need lots and lots of them in every shade of every color so that you can find the perfect one to match your outfit. Pretty crazy, I know.

Anyway, they were getting lost. CrazyMom would go to get Anna dressed in the morning and not be able to find the perfect matching doohickey. The obvious culprits are the older girls, but of course, they all insist that they always put them back in Anna’s room.

Stuff like this – someone not doing what they are suppose to do and you not knowing who it is – can get under your skin. I am supposed to be parenting my kids and training them to be responsible but I can’t figure out which kid needs trained. The dangerous thing is that I can start having negative feelings about suspected culprits. I mean, come on. We all know who is not flushing the toilets. And the hair doohickeys, well I will give you a hint – Miss Bookworm never wears any frilly things in her hair.

But in America it is innocent until proven guilty and I need to learn to do the same in my own home. The disappearing hair doohickey situation is a good reminder. We finally found the culprit; it was Patches, our cat.


Here is a photo of Miss Bookworm with Patches after she happened upon Patches’ secret stash of hair doohickeys under the couch.

The Good and Bad of Family T-Shirts

(Editor’s Note: This is part of an occasional series titled “Things I was Going to Post About a Year Ago”)

Miss Bookworm recently wrote an article for “Earthen Vessels,” a small self-published magazine out of Canada. As I was reading it, the line “I can hold my head high whenever somebody looks in awe, amazement, or disdain at our colorful family” caught my eye. It is true that when our family is in public we often attract a variety of looks from other people. While I feel somewhat indifferent to the attention we attract, I know that our children are more impressionable.

Prior to our summer travels last year, I was reflecting on all of the places we would be going, the looks/comments/questions we would receive, and what effect it would have on our children. I wanted to do something to help foster a sense of family pride for these public times so that our kids could “hold their heads high.” This led us to making family t-shirts. The front of our t-shirts had a drawing related to each person in our family while the backs declared that big families rock.


Now, heading out to an amusement park or some other public venue with the nine of us dressed in the exact same shirt happens to be on the edge of my comfort zone, but the kids loved it. There were several positive impressions that I had from wearing the t-shirts for a summer.

• A sense of togetherness. It is hard to explain, but I felt like we were closer together when we all had the same shirt on. It was like we were a team ready to take on the world.
  
• A Conversation Starter. We talked to far more people than we would have otherwise. Almost all of the conversations were uplifting. While large families are rare, they are not as rare as we thought. Many people would come up to us to tell us about how many siblings or children they had.
  
• Easy Kid Tracking. I am often stressed in busy public places about possibly losing track of a child. The shirts significantly reduced my level of stress because I could locate every child in a quick glance.
  
• Promotion of Large Families. We were a walking billboard. I list this here as a positive, but I am not one to live in a fish bowl. At one point I was walking along with Miss Bookworm and people were yelling, “Hey, Big Crazy Family!” and waving to us as they passed overhead on a sky lift.
  
• Being the Envy of Young Children. Multiple times I heard kids asking their parents why they did not have family t-shirts. Then parents would ask us where they could get these t-shirts, not knowing that we had them made.
  

There were a few things that I did not like about wearing the t-shirts, chief of which was that I could not go covert as a parent. If you are a parent I am sure you have been in a situation where your child behaves badly and everyone is looking around to see who the parent is. Then you look around too, like you don’t know. Of course, it never works very well when the kid looks like you. Adoptive parents have a leg up on going covert, but there is not a chance in the world when the kid is wearing the same shirt as you. Bummer.

Overall it was a positive experience and drew us closer together as a family while at the same time allowing us to reach out more to others. The only thing I would do differently would be to include the phrase “We are a family, not a daycare” right on the shirt to save us from answering that question all of the time. And maybe if it was printed on the shirts, our girls would have been able to convince the girl they met in the petting zoo that we actually were a family.

Oh, Whoever You Are!

(Note: Enough of you have complained to my children about me not posting for awhile that you have won. They have diligently passed along your calls for a post pushing it to the top of my list. I have to admit that I am unsure about the power that you have over my family!)

It is common knowledge that parents, in the middle of trying to get a particular child’s attention, have a hard time coming up with the right name. I often find myself calling in rapid pseudo birth order many of our children’s names when trying to address a child.

If that was the worst that it was, I would not feel too bad. But . . .

I sometimes will say, "Buddy! Little Foot! K.D.! Oh, whoever you are! Pick up those toys right now!" I am desperately trying to curb the "Whoever you are!" because it is borderline derogatory. But in the heat of the moment after I have gone through three, four, or even five names and have not hit the right one yet, it just slips out.

If that was the worst that it was . . .

Tonight I hit a new low. I had the youngest two boys "helping" me fix the gas fireplace. I had to go settle a date-on-the-milk-jug issue (clearly a story for another post) and upon my prompt return, one of the boys had already disappeared.

"K.D.!," I yelled, a little agitated that he had run off.

"Yes," said K.D. who was standing a few feet in front of me probably wondering why I was calling so loud.

It did not register. In my mind the kid in front of me did not have the name I was calling.

"K.D.!" I yelled even louder, now a little more than agitated because I knew he could not have gotten that far yet and was probably ignoring me.

"I’m right here, Dad." K.D. said again. This time it registered. I was yelling the wrong name.

"Oops." I said.

"Little Foot!" I yelled next.

"Here I am!" Little Foot said. He was hiding three feet from me and pretty tickled because he could see what was going on the whole time.