View from the North 40: Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man

Eleven kids aren’t that many. Any teacher would be happy to have that many kids in a classroom. A baker could make a regular dozen doughnuts and still have one left. So, yeah, 11 is nothing, unless that’s the number of children in your family.

I don’t mean my family, and I don’t mean your family, unless the math happens to work out that way for you. I mean my older brother’s family. There is, officially, 11 of the little darlings.

That’s a lot when you have to feed them and clothe them and have them, you know, spring forth from your loins, which is a strange old-fashioned-y euphemism for give birth.

The phrase might have been an effective birth-control method by the strength of its visual imagery, but once my brother and sister-in-law had a couple babies, I’m pretty sure they would’ve figured out that nothing was actually springing forth from anywhere.

And let’s be honest, past six or so kids, even if the newborns did spring forth from somewhere, at that point my brother would’ve just caught the kid with a baseball mitt and my sister-in-law would’ve said, “Good job, honey, let’s finish raking the yard before it gets dark out.”

Still, there is no getting around having to feed, clothe, house, transport, educate and, well, pay attention to them. The only thing that has really been a saving grace for them is that it took them a while to get from point A to point B so four of them are living on their own. Three of those first four were expensive because they were, for a significant stretch, teen-aged boys.

Those creatures cost A LOT to feed, and one was wearing size 13 shoes by the time he was 14 years old. You don’t just walk into any old store, let alone a second hand clothing store or a rummage sale, and find those boats.

You know what would be funny? If they got a divorce. Not that divorce is funny funny, it would just be situationally funny if they divorced and then remarried and each of their new spouses had two, three, four kids … and then they had some more together with new new spouses. They could have a combined 15, 20 kids, or more. The TV special would be a real-life “Yours, Mine and Ours.” But I suppose it would be more like “Yours, Mine, His, Hers, Ours and Theirs.”

They could drag this family expansion thing out for another decade.

As it is, four of their grandchildren are older than their youngest child and the fifth one is only a few weeks younger, so literally, when most of them came together in Montana over Memorial Day weekend, I heard “After you change your daughter’s diaper could you change your brother’s?” I wasn’t the only one who stared for a few seconds before laughing at them.

Who knows when any of this baby-making mania will end for any of them — except for the oldest son, who had two kids and quit. I mean quit-quit, like snip quit. And he would’ve had only one kid and a Labrador retriever, but his wife came from a big family of three (a statement that makes everyone in the family crack up) so she wanted to create at least one pair of siblings. Nephew had lots of experience with siblings and he thought they were over-rated, but agreed anyway despite the fact he couldn’t name the second one Rover.

In its current configuration, if the whole family got together in one place right now the head count would be two parents/grandparents, 11 kids with four spouses and one soon-to-be fiancé, and five grandkids with number six on the way. It has all the makings of a riddle: If Janey’s mom’s fourth daughter’s second sister’s son’s third uncle has two boys, is the diaper half full or can it actually be half empty?

(The answer is, of course, 42. I’m good with riddles at [email protected].)