To be or not to be a big family

Dear Mamas of Large Families,

How.

Do.

You.

Do.

It??????????????

For all intents and purposes, I've been in charge of the care of four teenage boys for ten days, plus a baby.  I had a couple of breaking points, one where I sat in my car with my head on my steering wheel, willing myself to get it together and walk back in the house.  More than once I was spent up physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  That probably sounds dramatic, but it's true.  I don't think that would have been the case had it not been for a nasty cold and the oh, MILLION degree temperatures and the running all over kingdom come.  Another was rescued by my keep-it-together husband who, upon our realization that our cat had- are you ready for this?- PEED IN OUR BED, watched me beginning to melt into a puddle of shock, horror, and disbelief, and grabbed the sheets and foam mattress pad off our bed and assured me that our mattress was not ruined and it was going to be ok and look!  We have clean sheets right here.

Except, you know what?  I also kind of loved it.

I mean, not the pee part.  The big family part.

Like I said before, I've loved my full table.  I've loved the camaraderie, loved the extra faces smiling at the baby, loved the places to go and things to do.  I just don't have any idea how to keep my house clean and the laundry done and put away in the midst of it all.

Seriously.  You need to see my bedroom.  Sweet Pea's pack-n-play in there is completely filled with clean but entirely crumpled laundry.  There is a pile of dirty laundry next to our bed where I tossed it just before falling in exhausted.  There are baskets full of other odd-and-ends of things, where I haphazardly tossed them in order to keep relative order in our home.

How do mamas of big families do it?  How do they get everyone everywhere, keep everyone fed, cuddled, loved, clean, and happy?  How do they decorate their homes and take pictures and blog and read and make time for themselves and their marriages?

So help me, how do they sleep?

Speaking of which, it's 10 am and neither my baby nor I have had breakfast.  One day last week I entirely forgot to give her breakfast in the face of a crazy mixed up schedule and her ridiculously sweet nature and the fact that I'd already fed five other people and had driven an hour round-trip to pick up other kids, all before 9 am.

Honey, can we have another baby?

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