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By Root 348 0

toddled up the stairs for bath and bedtime. That was Jon’s time with the kids, and he was so thorough and involved—and fast! He quickly earned the title of Bath Man. He would bathe the kids every night and put them to bed every night. During that time, I would start working on whatever I didn’t get to finish that day—cleaning the kitchen, grocery shopping, laundry, etc. It wasn’t unheard of for me to be doing my eighth load of laundry after ten p.m. I tried not to get behind, but if even one kid was sick, it threw off our entire schedule. We could go from eight loads to sixteen in no time flat!

Even on the weekends, we had to follow our strict schedule. After all, everyone still had to eat and sleep and clean and play.

At the kitchen table for a yummy meal.

My favorite Saturday breakfast was pancakes (“cancakes,” as Aaden calls them), which I loved to make. After I stopped working, Saturday also meant my least favorite thing: cleaning day! I remember one Saturday when Jon helped me clean the upstairs, the kids’ rooms, and then took all the kids outside in the beautiful sunny 70 degree weather. I finished up the cleaning and then fed everyone lunch outside so we wouldn’t have to clean the dining room again (the chore that we both dread the most). In the afternoon, Jon ran errands and I cleaned the bathrooms downstairs and the floors.

Once a season I would go through all of the kids’ clothes to set aside things we needed to give away (often to another family with multiples) and replace with clothing that was given to us—mostly from my best friend, Jamie, who had twin girls a year younger than Cara and Mady and a son one year older than the little kids. I would store the clothes in labeled bins in the attic—more than enough for my six to wear. The trick was making sure I had the right sizes available since they wore a few different sizes at any one time. When Cara was between a five and six, Mady was not quite a five yet in length. We didn’t have room in the drawers to keep any sizes not currently needed, so the sorting process had to be accurate.

The endless hair designs on Sunday mornings before church—one of our carefully scheduled tasks.

Sunday mornings we left the house at 8:30 to attend church at 9:30, which meant I needed to be up by 6:30, lay out the kids’ clothing, and start getting ready. When everyone woke up, Jon started dressing them while I was getting ready. When I was done, Jon started getting ready, while I did the girls’ hair, packed the comfort items and food, which included breakfast, juice cups, a bottle of juice for refills (one bottle was only one cup per child), and snacks for on the way home from church. When we were finished loading everything and everyone into the car and started driving away, I would check the clock, which strangely always read 8:38 a.m. We were scheduled to the minute at times, but we had to be.

Schedules and routines were so important for us to survive, so we didn’t get lost in details. Time of breakfast, bedtime, everything was predictable. We had to remove the guesswork in order to survive. Being late for a meal could set off a chain reaction of starving kids having meltdowns and chaos erupting.

Letter to Madelyn

Dear Madelyn,

Because of you, I am a mommy! I waited my whole life to be your mommy. As a little girl, I dreamed of the day that I would hold you, my baby, in my arms.

I had two sets of twin dolls when I was young. I got Abigail and Artie (you know them well; you all play with them!) when I was three years old. Abigail is made of fuzzy pink fabric and she has a plastic head; Artie—named after your great grandpa, Arthur—is the same, but the fuzzy material is blue. I also had Gina and Geoffrey that Grandma made for me. They were a little bit like Cabbage Patch Kids, with bald plastic heads. They were well made—though a little bit scary looking (sorry, Grandma!)—and I loved them a lot and spent many hours feeding and dressing them.

I’ll never forget the day I had my first ultrasound and the doctor saw a little circle that was Cara, and then he found