Assessing the decision to have five kids

A few times in the history of this blog, I've written about the subject of large families.

How you define "large family" is obviously subjective, but in this day and age, I think anything more than three kids qualifies.

Forty years ago when I was growing up in suburban Cleveland? You would had to have had six kids or more to get into the Big Family Club.

Of course, I grew up surrounded by large Italian and Irish Catholic families, some of which had seven, eight, nine or more children. So my standards in this department may be a little high.

But I think we can agree that nowadays, having a big brood is a lot less common.

I know this because when someone asks me my kids' ages and I rattle them off (currently 19, 16, 14, 12 and 7), you can see them processing this information for a good three seconds. Then their eyes get a little wide and they say, "You have five kids?"

People with lots of kids are used to this, and as I've said before, I personally know four or five families with more offspring than us.

One is headed up by Brian and Laura, my wife's cousins. They have 10, four of whom were adopted from Liberia. They're one of the few families we can point to and say, "What, are they crazy?"

But no matter how you look at it, five children still puts us pretty high on the family size curve.

Interestingly, we never consciously made the decision to have a certain number of kids. Terry is the youngest of three in her family and I'm the youngest of four, so I guess we figured three or four was a pretty good target. Or at least a range we were both used to.

So we had four kids in pretty quick succession (just under 6 1/2 years). We spent the years from 2000 through 2005 as a family of six, carting around diaper bags, car seats, and all of the paraphernalia associated with having multiple small children.

Sometime in 2005, with Terry having turned 36 and me trailing close behind at 35, we decided that one more kid would be right for us. I don't remember when we reached this decision nor how, but we did.

And so, after a slight delay in Terry getting pregnant (something to which we weren't at all accustomed), we found ourselves expecting a fifth and final time. Little Jack came along at the end of January 2006, and soon after I gladly made the trek to the urologist's office to ensure there wouldn't be a Little Tennant #6.

Did we make the right decision?

Of course I'm going to say we did. To say otherwise would imply that I wish Jack had never come along, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. I love that little guy and am so glad he came into our lives.

But Terry often says that Jack's birth pushed her permanently over the edge into Perpetually Exhausted Mode. Not that having four kids was easy, but there's a big difference between being in your mid-30s and having four and approaching your mid-40s with five.

And it takes a concerted effort to arrange my schedule such that I get to spend time with all of them on a consistent basis. I wish I did a better job of it, but I do try.

Financially, you stop worrying about the long-term reality of helping to pay for five college educations and instead just put your head down and take it one day and one dollar at a time. There's really nothing else you can do.

Eventually, of course, we'll get through this. And in the meantime we get to make some awesome memories. Our house is often loud, messy and confusingly chaotic.

And if I'm being honest, I'll tell you I wouldn't have it any other way.

Though I gotta say, the monthly water bill alone is killing me.