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Articles in "We've Got a Lot of Kids"

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But Tuesday’s just as bad. The only thing I’ve ever had against Sunday is that it’s followed by Monday, and nothing good has ever happened on Monday, throughout recorded history. I’ve confirmed this through personal research, decades of devout drinking. But eventually the research went into the ditch, like it often does; I was compelled to abandon it entirely.

Our family is like a full-sized symphony orchestra, made of only trumpets.

Around the supper table our four kids compete with one another for air space, attention and the seats closest to Mom. While they joust in the same spectrum

Let me explain: I’ve been busy, work; my wife and our four kids: busy too. My people call their people; we do lunch. So we’ve all been quite busy; I love writing my columns, I love my wife and kids and I love my readers. You’re all fine, I swear.

Our youngest daughter Gracie, seven, has recently lost almost all of her front teeth, sometimes two at a time, so there’s been plenty of visits from the Tooth Fairy lately.

Our kids have been playing Slug-bug for several months. On a particularly long, dull, sodden and bickering car-ride back from some interminable shopping trip, my lovely wife Maria taught them to scan the freeway for Volkswagen Beetles to pass the time and keep them from picking on each other for sport.

Our family recently took a camping trip for our summer vacation. Circumstances make camping an attractive option for us, as it is for many families: low cost, low hygiene requirements, and all outdoors, those fields of the Lord, in which to play.

My wife Maria had actually never been camping before, which left no one else in our family to be a know-it-all about camping except me.

It’s an anniversary: I’ve been writing We’ve Got a Lot of Kids for six years, and we still have a lot of kids, and I’m still writing columns about them.

Over the last year our kids have grown a little taller, a little smarter, more graceful; they’ve shed baby fat and grown into semi-sophisticated grade-schoolers with quickly formed, quickly changed and vehemently held opinions. 

Our kids all attend Vashon schools, Chautauqua Elementary. Two are going into first grade next year. Our older two will be in third and fifth grades.

I’m in our library, working on an earlier version of this column, when the fragile calm is shattered like a brick tossed through a window. Our oldest son Colin, ten, and oldest daughter, Meredith, eight, have discovered that they disagree.