Sunday, March 9, 2008

hands & hearts full

Ever since I was a little girl I wanted a big family. I remember singing the Janice Kapp Perry song about "when I grow up I want to be a mother....and have a family. One little, two little, three little babies of my own!" Of course I kept going up to twelve because I wanted 12 kids. I know many of you are wondering......we don't know how many more kids we will have. It depends on what the Lord wants to send us. I know I'm not done even though pregnancy and having babies is difficult. I LOVE having my "quiver full"!

That said.......

I know when we go places we do cause heads to turn. Try to picture this family of red heads (mostly little girls, and all cuter than heck I might add!) and I'm sure you can imagine what people must think. Luckily our kids are well behaved most of the time (in public anyway!) so we have rarely gotten any negative comments. We do get a lot of : "You have your hands full!", and "Are ALL of these your kids?", or "You don't look old enough to have that many children!" I like the last comment of course! I do occasionally hear "You're done, right?!". My answer has always been, "We plan to keep going until we get an ugly one!" I don't think people expect that!
I have been trying to think of comebacks to the other comments. One time someone said I had my hands full and I laughed and told them I only had half the kids with me, the other half was at home. They didn't even try to keep their mouth closed. I usually just smile. I never want to give anyone the impression that I don't love being a mom and that I don't thoroughly enjoy having a bunch of kids.

So, if you can think of any good comebacks I'd love to hear them! I'm sure my friends that have several children also (that is more than 3) have heard some fun remarks as well.

Good things:
Big families
Being a mom
Teaching my kids what's important

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, Ang, you're hilarious! One day you might become like the Duggars, with 17 children, and still young.
How fun would that be?

I have a couple comebacks for you:
You could say something that implies that Dave is a polygamist, or pretend that a couple are Akayla's, so they'll die of humiliation for asking. I don't know, you're better at that stuff.

P.S. Check every single page of your blog, I went comment crazy. I love your blog!

Jenny-ology said...

Thanks for coming to my blog and leaving me such a nice comment. I don't think you are a 'nutcase' as you said. I LIVE for comments! Especially happy ones! I think you are right, we do have alot in common.
I get alot of kid comments like this and I usually just say "and I can't imagine life without one of them!" or for the "don't you just have your hands full" I say, but they are all so cute, I don't mind a bit".
My mother had 9 children and she finally started to say: "Well, once we finally figured out what was causing them, we didn't want to stop!"

Jennifer Alba Apffel said...

Ang, I just admire the heck out of you! In one of my human development classes, the teacher said something like, "I'm contributing higher intelligence to the gene pool (Lord knows we need it), what are you doing to make the world a better place?" If someone says something about over-population, you could always quip, "My children will be the scientists and politicians that solve that problem. What do you/your children do?" Have fun, girl!

Lisa said...

Too funny Ang. I just wrote an email to my family all about our night at Sam's Club and all the comments we get. It's too long to sum up so maybe I'll email it to you. So fun to have lots of kids!!!! I love it.