We didn’t always have 8 kids. Yeah, big surprise. We actually started out pretty normally back in 1989 with the birth of our first daughter. My wife was in medical school in her last year and I was a month away from finishing my MBA while working for Texas Instruments. We had things pretty much planned and under control. As new parents we were busy. Heck, we thought we were the busiest people in the world. All our time was consumed with work, school, and our little girl. Just for kicks, we added searching for a location for my wife to attend residency, selling our house, moving and taking care of our kiddo. Those were busy times, and I really thought things were hectic. Honestly, I look back and can’t figure out how I filled my days. There was, comparatively, nothing to do.

Sure, work expanded to fill the time. Having one child you tend to focus on that little one and invest a lot of time there. That probably explains why she walked, talked, and could feed herself so quickly. Constant parental attention whenever we were around will do that to a kid.

Six months after our daughter was born, we successfully moved from Texas to Kansas (with a brief one-month stay in my in-laws’ house before we found a new home). My wife had started her obstetrics/gynecology residency. I had started my own computer consulting business, run out of the house. We had a baby sitter two days a week, and I juggled my business appointments around that schedule. We had settled into a routine. We were busy. All our time was taken up with the things that we had to do.

Fast forward two years, and we were due to have another baby. We knew the due date was on our oldest daughter’s birthday. So well planned, the two kids were going to to be spaced exactly two years apart. Nice. Neat. Almost had an engineering ring to it.

Since it was the middle of my wife’s medical residency, and this was the early 1990’s, we kept things quiet until about midway through the pregnancy. No reason to upset the other residents and teaching staff announcing a pregnancy that would mess up their scheduling. Then we discovered that we were having twins. Slight surprise there, but still within what we considered the normal range. The twins’ due date was confirmed to be our oldest daughter’s second birthday, so things were pretty much moving along on schedule.

But you know how when you make plans God has a way of laughing at you and changing things up a bit. Well, we had a major plot twist eight weeks before the twins’ due date. My wife was at the hospital during a really busy week. Several sets of twins had been delivered, and she had been involved in at least three of the deliveries. One morning she went to work for a 36 hours shift (those were still common at that time). In those pre-texting days, we had an occasional voice call to catch up with each other during her long shifts. She called and told me she was headed in to attend another twin delivery and would call me when she got done. The urgent call I got a while later wasn’t from her, but rather from one of the nurses at the hospital telling me to come on in, my wife was in labor! She’d gone into labor during the other delivery. The girls were born two minutes before and two minutes after 12:30am. I always joke with them that if they’d hurried they could have had different birthdates. I think it would’ve been cool. They’re my kids, so they think I’m an idiot.

A couple of weeks later, they were able to come home from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the hospital, and then the real fun began. Seriously, it was fun, but definitely hectic. I thought I had known what that meant, but I was wrong. Of course, those early hectic days were just a preview of later in life, but who knew? My wife was home for a short while, but her residency didn’t really have a formal timeframe for postpartum home stays, so she was back to work pretty quickly. We had the usual visits by family members and help from everybody, but lots of the childcare fell to me. I was also running my computer consulting business from our house…and actually officed in the twins’ room as our basement (including my office) had flooded six months before and the repairs hadn’t been completed yet.

For the most part, I was a stay-at-home Dad with three kiddos under two years of age. When you have twins you discover that they get into loads more trouble earlier than a single child. When you have a ring-leader who’s two years older it’s even worse. To say they were creative at getting into things would be a huge understatement. It’s amazing to me how much trouble those three little girls could get into when I was busy for just a couple of minutes.

No matter how careful I was, how watchful I was, how attentive…they would get into something. Then I was flying from one infant/toddler crisis to another. Oftentimes I was solving one crisis on the way to the next…carrying one or two of the kids on my hip.

Meal times were really exciting. Our oldest was just learning to really eat on her own and the twins needed to be fed. So I would make food for the three of them and then try to manage the three-ring circus. To get an idea of how crazy it was, we had two high chairs, one set on each side of the six foot wide china cabinet in our eating area. I would sit on a swiveling office chair and roll back and forth between the two chairs, feeding the twins. The whole time I was also trying to supervise our oldest, who was eating at the table, essentially behind my back. Two years later, when we got ready to move out of the house, we hoisted the china cabinet away from the wall. Lo and behold, in two perfect arcs on the wall, behind the china cabinet, were the glorious hues of green and orange from the pureed baby food that the twins had spread with their grubby little hands while I was feeding the other one. Since they reached behind the cabinet with their food covered hands, the arcs were just out of our view. And I was really trying to pay attention. Honest.

And that gets to my point. When your have your first child, your darling munchkin will fill all your time. A second child fills in all the nooks and crannies of your time you thought you still had, and your time will still be filled. Once you have three kids, you don’t have enough hands to hold them at the same time. You’re always juggling.

People ask me, “How do you do it with eight kids?”. It’s really easy to answer…we’re always juggling. I often wish I had more time to give to each of my kids, but I wouldn’t change our life for the world. They have grown, and are growing, into the most amazing people. They have the most astonishing relationships with each other.

There are days when the juggling is intense, like juggling eight running chainsaws. Other days, it’s like juggling eight sharpened knives. There is never a dull moment, but it can be done. I can’t vouch for whether it can be done while keeping one’s sanity intact, but it really is possible to juggle all the things that you need to do and all the kids that you have.

So get to it and juggle away.