Ten Ridiculous Questions and My Facetious Answers

I am the mother of seven children. I love having a large family and cannot imagine my life any other way. I have been asked a lot of silly questions over the years. Here are ten of the most frequent ones.

1. Are they all yours? Yes. Yes they are. I gave birth to six and adopted one of them. I claim them all. Once in a while a neighbor kid gets mixed in and I get a little confused when I count heads though.

2. Do they all have the same father? Believe it or not, complete strangers have asked me this question. It never fails to amaze me. And yes. Yes. I've been happily married for thirty years now. The oldest is twenty-six.

3. Are you Catholic? No. I am not Catholic. I’m pretty sure all religious groups allow married couples to reproduce.

4. Were they all planned? I’d really love to talk to you about the origin of each one of my children’s lives but that would be kind of weird. And, the kids are standing right here listening.

5. You must homeschool, right? Ummmm. No. We don’t. Not that there is anything wrong with that…. 

6. How do you feed them all? Well, my husband works and brings home a paycheck and then I go to the grocery store. But we only have six plates so they have to take turns… 

7. Are you done? Well of course I am done. Who in their right mind would have eight kids? That is just a ridiculous number of children. I cannot imagine how we would be able to feed them all.

8. How can you afford seven children? We can’t. We will still be paying student loans off when we are in the nursing home. Got any spare change?

9. How do you keep them all straight? Give me a break. There aren’t a hundred of them. Only seven. I know their names and their ages. I even know a few other things about each of them too.

10. Do they fight? They do occasionally fight. They are siblings.