Surviving Six

I recently watched my nephews and niece for three days, bringing the kid count up to six. When I explained that I was “embracing the chaos of six kids” on my Facebook status, a friend wrote “you and Angelina Jolie both!” I loved that I read that comment in food stained pajamas, hair un-brushed, with a chorus of kids asking for breakfast in the background. Just like Angelina, right?

In fact, I had just recently picked up the People magazine with Brad and Angelina on the cover. (Now that I live in LA, I feel like I can buy it without quite as much guilt - I‘m just researching my neighbors after all.) “Brangelina” are a nice distraction from daily life - they walk the red carpet one day and then sell their twin baby photos for $14 million dollars the next. Yes, they have six kids. They probably also have six nannies, six chefs, six cleaning people, six landscapers… Which is why it also cracked me up that in the magazine, on the opposite page of their spread, they showed another couple with six kids who could maybe “give some advice” to Brad and Angelina.

This couple, looking like they hadn’t slept in months as they sat in their cluttered playroom, described the importance of making the time for a date night once a month but joked that they usually ended up in Target by the end of the evening to pick up some diapers. (And I’m reading it thinking, wow, cheers to you guys, we only have three and haven’t had a date night since I can remember!) I’m pretty sure Angelina has never set foot in a Target, so I’m not sure exactly what advice People magazine had in mind.

I can tell you anyway, after just three days, that there is no advice for “raising” six kids because there‘s no way you can. You just try to keep them alive and fed and maybe even occasionally bathed as they run wild through the house. Every once and a while you yell out to make sure the baby hasn’t escaped from the house. Mostly you do lots of laundry and prepare lots of glasses of milk and snacks. You try your best to keep your sanity (which was maybe a little shaky anyway after a summer with three kids home all day) despite being bombarded with requests every time you walk into a room:
“Where are my shoes?”
“Can I have a snack?”
“Lucy hit me!”
“Mom, take Noni away, she’s getting into our game!”
“I need a glass of milk.”
“What are we doing next?”
This is all at the same time and with the new Miley Cyrus CD blaring at top volume in the “background” so it sounds more like:
“RRROOOOOOOAAAAARRRR!”

Don’t get me wrong, my nephews and niece are very well behaved kids. And in general, barring the occasional attempts to scratch each other to death, the girls are pretty easy as well. But after just a few days, I felt completely drained. At one point, I went to the backyard to bring our cat in for the evening and ended up collapsing on a chair. I sat there for about five minutes, wondering how long I could pull off sitting in the chair before Toby started to become suspicious about my cat searching skills. It was just so calm in our yard. So…quiet.

So Angelina, I’m going to give you some advice from a tired mom who survived three days with six kids. Read the article about yourself. Look at the article on the following page. Then call the poor woman, apologize for the author who thought your lives were even remotely similar, and then offer to send over your chefs and nannies and landscapers. Even for just a day. Take it from someone who did it for three days - that woman needs a break.

And as for me, the benefit of watching six kids? Suddenly three seems almost even peaceful.