I Never Wanted Kids? Paying for College, How We Do Birthdays, Room Sharing + More!

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. I'm Angela Braniff, and today I'm gonna be answering your questions about what it's like to have a big family, what it's like to be a mom of eight, and just sort of general large family questions. Before we jump into the questions, I just wanna take a second because I know there's a lot of new faces around here. So if you are new, we are a family of 10 total. We have eight children. We have biological children and children that we have adopted. So our family is kind of pieced together like a puzzle piece. We have two biological kids, two kids that we adopted internationally, two kiddos that we adopted domestically, and then twins that we adopted as embryos. So they are not genetically our children, but I carried them and gave birth to them. So that's kind of a picture of our family and how it's put together. We homeschool and I work from home. So that is kind of the gist of our family structure. Before we jump into these questions, just in case you are new, I just didn't want you to feel lost if I was answering something and you're like, wait a second, you what? I don't, huh? Let's go ahead and jump into the questions. These were questions that you guys left for me on Instagram. I'll put my handle here. If you want to go follow me over there. These were from Instagram and then some from previous videos. So let's go ahead and jump into the questions. There are tons of questions about this. This question truly was asked many, many times about how we make sure that all the kids get attention. How do we give individualized attention when you have eight children? The short answer is that we are not perfect. Some seasons we're really good at this and some seasons we're not so good at this. But basically kind of what we strive to do, because I'm not going to sugar coat it, making sure that you are carving out individual time for eight children is absolutely a challenge. And it's something that you have to be cognizant of. It's something you have to be intentional about. You need to be thinking about. It's not something that will, at least in my experience, is not something that's just going to happen naturally. So we do have to try. And for us, a lot of times that just looks like kind of individual dates with the kids. Either dad's going to do something with maybe a couple of the boys or I'm going to do something with a couple of the girls. And those would be kind of like more fun date things. So, you know, recently I took three of my daughters to go see the Little Women movie. And then my husband took our two boys to go do go-karts. And so we do try to kind of divide up into smaller groups as well. As far as individual attention, we find that that is honestly, it's so hard to explain because it just kind of has to be taken in the moment when it's presented itself as an opportunity. So if that's running to the grocery store, if that is I'm upstairs folding laundry and my 11-year-old daughter wants to come flop on the bed and talk to me about something, that is taking the time to stop and snuggle with one of the kids while they're watching a movie. It's really just kind of, you have to look for the opportunities for a lack of better term, to pick one off. You had to pick one off from the herd and look for the opportunities to really connect with them on a one-on-one basis. And I do feel like because of our family dynamic, because we are home and we are together like all the time and homeschooling and everything, we do have a lot of opportunities for that. I think it would be a little harder for us. And again, I'm only really speaking for our family. Big families make all kinds of scenarios work. So this is just what works for us. But I do think it would be harder for us if all of our kids were in school all day. And so then we only had that window in the evening to try to connect with everybody. I think that would prove to be a little harder, but because we're home and we're homeschooling and stuff, I feel like we can really snag those little windows of time when they are there. Any tips on buying clothing for many kids and saving money? I'm not so good at this. I used to be better. I am not so good at this. I find kid clothes to be honestly rather difficult because our children are very hard on their clothes. Our boys are. So we and our boys are also pretty much the exact same size, our six and eight-year-old. So they cannot, like our eight-year-old can't pass clothes down to our six-year-old because they wear the same size. And by the time he's done wearing it, our eight-year-old, it's holey and not going to be able to be worn. Like our boys wear out their clothes. They don't usually grow out of their clothes before they wear them out. So that is hard. I have tried looking for thrifted clothes and going to secondhand shops to shop for the kids. Kids' clothes, honestly, just they really do get beat up and not just our kids, but other kids, which means often what's coming into the thrift shop isn't in great condition, at least from what I found. Now, I will say that I am working on honing my skills when it comes to thrifting. That is one of my goals this year is to make more of an effort with that. But what we typically do is, you know, when we need new clothes for the kids, we go to places like Old Navy, sometimes Target, but I find that if I've got coupons and money back and things like that, I can snag some pretty good deals at Old Navy. And I use my card and then pay it off, like my Old Navy card, which this is not me recommending that you do that. I'm not giving any financial advice. I'm just saying that I use my card and then pay it off. And I often have a good chunk of money on there available to spend because of the way their cash rewards work. By the time I'm ready to do the next round of clothes shopping, I can often get a lot of clothes for pretty cheap. So it's tough because I am making a move more towards ethical and sustainable shopping for myself. It is harder for kids, I have found. There are a lot of really great shops, but I just can't pay $40 for a dress, you know, across the board for eight kids. Lots of questions. This one says, do you rely on your older children to help out with the younger ones? Lots of questions about how my older kids feel about, you know, having to help with their younger siblings. Lots of different wordings of that question in here. I'm just gonna go ahead and kind of address it like as a whole picture really quickly. So first of all, we are firm believers that like you are a part of a family unit and we all contribute to all things in our home. And that's just part of like living in a family and having that dynamic. Whether there are two siblings or 10 siblings, that's just kind of part of having a family dynamic. The second piece of that is no, none of our children are responsible for or the caretakers for their younger siblings. But it's just like anything else. If my hands are full doing this or my husband's hands are full and he says, hey, can you help with the baby so that we can finish loading the dishwasher or whatever? It's just sort of like asking your kid to help with really anything. It's just kind of part of the chores and tasks and things that need to be done in order for our family to function. So I'm trying to make sure that, I wanna be careful of my wording here because I am very sarcastic by nature. So I have to be very careful that I'm not being insulting when I don't mean to be. I don't think that teaching children to be a little selfless is bad in any way. I think that giving them responsibilities, requiring them to help around the house, none of those are bad things. And quite frankly, I feel like it's just something that's really needed in this generation of kids that are being raised today. And so I don't have a problem with my kids helping out. And some people might see that as more responsibility than they would wanna give their kids or whatever, but it works for our family. And the other thing that I think is really important to kind of take note of is that everybody's personality types are different. And so for some kids, sort of helping with younger kids or helping with babies or whatever is just part of their nature and who they are and what they enjoy. I have three children that really enjoy helping with the younger ones. My oldest daughter who's 13, she loves babies and little kids and stuff and she likes helping out. My daughter, Rosie, who's eight years old, she loves to help. She wants to be helpful in any way that she can and she wants to help with the babies and the younger kids. She actually doesn't really see herself a lot of times as one of the children. This is my daughter that we adopted from China that has Down syndrome and she really sees herself more in an adult role. And so sometimes we have to remind her like, hey, girlfriend, you're a kid, you're not an adult, but she really likes to take that caretaking role. And so does my eight-year-old son. He also really enjoys doing things to help care for his younger siblings. So it's really kind of based on their personality types. But yeah, so every kid is different. So we try to kind of feed into our kids' strengths and what they are good at, what they enjoy, what they like doing and sort of help them with that. But we also like to challenge them in areas where maybe it's not their nature to be a certain way or to do a certain thing or to think to do a certain thing. We like to challenge them in that way. So all of this to say, all of this talking, just to say that no, our children are not responsible for raising or taking care of their younger siblings. They are responsible for contributing to our house in what that might look like in the details of maybe you need to hold this baby while I finish vacuuming or whatever. So yes, they are required to contribute in that way. But I do believe ultimately that all of these things, their responsibilities, whether it's helping with younger siblings or feeding the dogs or sweeping the floor, unloading the dishwasher, all of those things are contributing to their overall character and helping them to be better functioning adults as they get older and go into society and they know how to take care of themselves. They know how to be a little selfless. They know how to put others in front of themselves when they need to. And I think all of those qualities at the end of the day are great qualities to have and to work on really for anybody. But I hope that translates into my kids growing up into very self-sufficient, independent and happily functioning members of society. How do you handle being with your kids 24 seven? Over the last 13 years, this has looked different for me and different phases of life and depending on just kind of the season we were in and how difficult it was. In different seasons, I've done different things. So there was periods of time where I made sure that I had things that I was doing outside of the home, maybe once a week, just to kind of get me out and talking to other adults because I think that is the hardest part when you have a lot of little kids and you are home all day, being touched all day and hung on all day and not really having any kind of a coherent conversation with anybody. That's kind of the hardest part to me when you're in that toddler baby phase. Now I do still have three under three, but I also have a 13 year old and an 11 year old and an eight year old, two eight year olds, who can carry on good conversations. So I don't feel the same way that I did years ago. And sometimes that just looks like running to the store, running to the grocery store by yourself, running and getting a coffee. If you can, meeting a girlfriend for coffee or dinner or something like that. I have also been known to just get in my car and drive around and listen to music. Or if you're super crunched for money, just get in your car and drive to the nearest parking lot and sit in silence and listen to music and sip on a coffee that you brought from home. You know what I mean? Like you just sometimes need a minute. And so that has been helpful for me. In this stage of life, I don't feel that way because I am kind of like, I have a mix of, you know, intensely with my kids and then working throughout the day. And I just, it's a different season for me right now where I really feel like I savor every second that I have with the kids. I'm just in kind of one of those seasons where, you know, my work life is very full and my home life is very full. And so I'm just trying really hard to like savor and be present in both places when I'm in that place. And we all have our moments, guys. Like we all have our moments where toddlers are screaming, there's a mess, like, and we just feel like, holy cow, like I just want to run away. We all have those moments. But overall, I try to really enjoy being with my kids. And I try to stop and ask myself, is this situation, am I annoyed, am I frustrated because it's just they're inconveniencing me in some way or this is some unmet expectation? Because it's usually not really the kids. It's truly, there's something else to it. So I just try to be really honest with myself and very introspective because I'm the adult in this situation. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm the one who can make the changes and adapt quicker and easier. So I try to just be very self-aware, if that makes sense, like as a parent, what I'm bringing to this current situation that feels stressful or whatever. Have there been any unexpected bonds between your kids that go deeper than others? Yeah, this is a great question. I'm always surprised. Again, our kids kind of go through seasons where they're close in different ways at different times, but I am often surprised by certain little bonds. Like right now, Rosie and Amelia. So Rosie's our eight-year-old daughter and Amelia is one of our two-year-old twins. And they just have this very special little connection and little bond and they love to play together and build blocks and stuff. Now, listen, Amelia is a little bit of a bossy boss. So Rosie will like tolerate that for a little bit, but then they might start to fight. But it's just kind of funny because it's like they get each other. You know, they get the desire to be bossy, but somehow they manage to work it out between the two of them and there's just one boss at a time. But they have like this special little bond, which is really neat right now. So the kids definitely go through phases with that for sure. How did you decide which kids will share a bedroom? We get asked this question a lot because we have eight children and a five-bedroom house. So we do have bedroom sharing happening and we are very intentional about who shares a room with who without going into like too much personal detail about my kids specifically. We just choose that based on personalities, track record of that child, you know, kind of if there's any trust issues or things like that. Again, it does complicate things, guys. Like the truth is it complicates things when you're bringing children into your home that come from traumatic backgrounds and that's part of adoption. And so that means that we have to sometimes think through things a little bit differently to do what's best for all of the kids. And so we kind of have our bedroom situations arranged as such so that everybody's sort of in the best situation for them as an individual. But I know lots of people, you know, my sister has seven children. Her children are all biological. So they just do a boy's room and a girl's room and they do bunks and stuff like that. So I know other big families that do that or sometimes they'll put like older kids with some of the younger kids. We have just kind of have ours divided up in a way that works for our family. And I think that's truly like just the biggest thing. You got to figure out what works for your family because it is going to look different for everybody. How do we do birthdays with a big family since we've adopted with birthdays could be close together. Yeah, birthdays, we have a heavy birthday season, a season of basically a couple of months where there's a whole lot of birthdays like six or something like that. So what we do for birthdays is we really like to give our kids experiences over things. So we just ask them, what do you want to do today? They get to pick what we have for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then we ask them what they want to do. And we just go do something together as a family. Typically that can look like going to an amusement park or bowling or to the movies or, you know, really whatever that kid kind of has that they want to do. And the day is just sort of about them and what they want to do. And everybody knows that. We do still give them a couple of presents, but we don't do a ton. And then we just make the day all about them and what they want and just make it really special for them in that way. So we do kind of have milestone birthdays that we might do a little bit bigger of something for, but on the whole, that's just kind of how we handle birthdays is we don't do big birthday parties and have friends over and all that kind of stuff. Because for us, that's just, that would be so many parties back to back to back. It would be hard on our friends and family to ask them to come over for that many parties, that many weekends, especially during that heavy birthday season. And then the pressure to bring a gift for the child. We don't want to impose our decisions to have a big family on everybody around us, all of our friends and family. So that's just what works for us to kind of keep everybody's birthday special and about them, but not have to take a second mortgage out on the house every year to fund birthdays. How did you come up with all the names? I'm running out. Names is hard, y'all. That is definitely, naming children is hard. And I often have a running list on my phone in my notes section on my phone of names I hear that I like and I think, oh, I might want to use that someday. And I legit have that list for like, maybe someday if I ever have a pet llama or like the names, it's just names I like. It's not like we're having another kid, so I better have this list. It's like, what if we ever get another dog? What if we get a pet llama or goats? Like I want to have all the names that I like written down, but it is hard. Your plan for kids is college trade school money. We are trying to think that out with our big family. So I've talked about this a little bit before and it's a twofold answer for me. The first part of the answer, and I want to be clear that my answer has been this part of the answer before this part of the answer came along. So I just want to say that. The first part of the answer is that my parents did not pay for me to go to college. My parents did not have a big college savings fund for me. It was, if you want to go to college, you have to fund that yourself. We want you to go to college if that's what you want to do. And through my adult life and the things that I've done, I have discovered for myself and that for my children, I want my children to do something that feels fulfilling for them. And so if they want to go to college and that's what they need to do in order to do that career that they have on their heart, if that's a veterinarian or they want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, then college is the way that they need to go. But if our children want to go to a technical school, if they want to go to a certificate school, if they want to go learn a trade, all of those jobs are very much needed. And I think that the idea that every kid is on the path for college is not accurate. And it's so tough because you don't want to downplay the importance of college or getting a college education and a degree like what that can mean, but it is not for everybody. And I know this as someone that it was not for. I really want to help my children think through what they want with their life to be very discerning, to make choices that are best for them and not just this standard checklist cut and dry kind of thing that you do this and then you do this and then you do this. I don't want that for my kids. I have a book coming out all about my life and how I fought against the sort of checklist life and how I fought back against that feeling like I needed to just check boxes to get through and I don't want that for my kids. So that's the first answer to the question is that all of our kids going to college is not necessarily our expectation that every single child will want to go to a four-year university and get a bachelor's degree. So we have never felt pressure that we have to have $50,000 savings account per kid to cover their college even though today that wouldn't touch a four-year degree for college. We've never felt like that was something that we had to have for every child. And we also never wanted that to stop us. If we felt that God was asking us to step out in faith and add another child to our family and adopt again, we never wanted to say, well, we can't adopt because we don't have enough money to put a college fund together for that child. Like there are children in foster care and orphanages and all over the world that need homes and families. They need love and food on the table and that kind of security. They don't need fully funded wedding funds and college funds. So that's kind of my feeling on that. I get a little bit like eee about this topic because I know some people are very aggressive about their feelings about having all of these savings accounts for your kids and stuff. And to me, that's just unrealistic for most people and an expectation that I do think stops people from moving forward with things like adoption because it seems like, well, not only do you have to pay for the adoption, but then you also have to pay for all of this other stuff later. So the second piece of that, and I've talked about this a little bit before and it's just very briefly that a family member of ours who I've never known, separated by a couple of degrees, was very high up in the military, never had children. And when he passed away years ago, he had put in place a family educational trust so that his family down the line after he passed away and their children would have the opportunity to go to college should they want to. So that is available to my children should they want to go to college, they can apply. And who knows what that fund will look like by the time they are in college, but that is an option for my kids. So I just wanted to kind of add that because I've talked about it before in other videos, but not approaching it to our kids like, oh, listen, college is just paid for so you can just do whatever you want. We're approaching it like you've decided that a four-year university is what you want to do, then you're gonna work really hard, you're gonna apply for scholarships, we're gonna find a school that makes sense for you and what you want to do, and we will do everything we can to help them and then kind of utilize that family resource if we need to. But yeah, hopefully that answers that question. I'm not trying to open a can of worms, I'm just trying to answer the question honestly. How do you muster up the energy for family trips when there's so much work? You guys, listen, this is like a mantra and our family, if you've watched our vlogs, we've talked about it. I know I've talked about it on Instagram and stuff before, but we remind ourselves constantly and repeat to ourselves constantly that hard doesn't have to mean bad. I just find that once we've done it, like once we're there at the destination or once we've gotten everything underway, I'm so glad that I did. It's kind of like washing your hair where you really just don't want to do it because you know what's about all the work that's coming after with blow drying and curling and straightening and all the things, but after you do it, you're like, oh, it feels so nice to have clean hair. It's like that. Now, of course, you also have the piece of it where you're gonna get to the destination and everybody's still gonna act like little turkeys and then you're gonna be like, why did I do this? That happens from time to time, but for the most part, it's just always worth it for us to take the time to do stuff like that because we don't want to be trapped. My husband and I don't want to be trapped. We don't want to be trapped in the house. We don't want to feel like we can't go anywhere and we want to, despite the fact that we have a big family, want to be able to go and do things together and experience things together as a family and explore the city and explore different places and go hiking and all the things that we love to do and that we would do if we had two or three kids. I would say the only thing that we don't do because we have a big family very often is eat out. Number one, it's really expensive and number two, it can be really chaotic because you got to hit like the perfect time of day for everybody to be hungry, nobody to be in need of a nap. It's just the choreography of taking eight kids out to eat is not something I love doing. We do it, but not nearly as often as we probably would if we only had a couple of kids. How do you shop for groceries? We have just four kids and it's cray-cray. Well, grocery pickup is our friend. We, I don't remember how long ago, started doing grocery pickup and I honestly have really, really loved it. It makes things, it does a couple of things. It, number one, keeps you from having to take a bunch of toddlers into a grocery store where they purposely put all of the bright colored cereals and stuff just right in their eyeline, okay? So you're saving yourself the trouble. I try to avoid problems if I can. It also can help you not to overspend on your grocery budget because you're not walking around the store, seeing things, throwing things into the cart that you don't need or not on your list, right? So it can help save you money to do grocery pickup as well. At least I find that's been true for us. So grocery pickup is how I avoid that. I have had to take all of my kids in the grocery store before. It's not that we've never done that, but I try to avoid it. What's your favorite thing about having a big family? Honestly, it definitely gets chaotic, but I kind of love that in a way. I don't know how to explain it. I just love that there is so much love, that there's so many people around who care about each other and want to take care of each other and just want to be there for each other. I think that as we all kind of go through life, one of the hardest things is feeling lonely, feeling like you're kind of on this island by yourself and you feel lonely. And I can tell you that with eight children, nobody ever feels lonely. Loneliness, not a feeling, I'm kidding. But I just, I love knowing that my kids are always going to have each other too, like growing up and into adulthood. You know, they'll obviously make choices about relationships and things like that, but they're always at least know that baseline, they have each other. And when Christopher and I are gone, they'll have each other. And hopefully when Christopher and I are older with eight of them, somebody will be bound to be willing to take care of us. So chore charts and allowance. I've talked about this a little bit before. I actually have a video coming up. I'm looking at my production calendar because I don't know when that video will be coming up, but I am going to share with you guys about our kids' chores and how they earn money or because we don't really do allowance, but how they earn money. I'm going to do a whole video about that, but it should be up by the end of the month, maybe the first week of February. So be on the lookout for that. What's the most expensive part of having a big family? Food and shoes. That's a toss up, food and shoes. As you guys know, we're working on getting our food budget under control, but shoes, man, they tear through shoes and shoes are not cheap and shoes. How do you handle all the dishes that accumulate? The dishes get done about three times a day in our house. Does anyone approach you in public to comment on your family? Yep, all the time. Somebody asked, do our older kids ever want space from the younger kids and how do we handle that? Again, I think that sometimes people are assuming that because we have eight children or whatever that we're all just sitting in the living room together all the time. That's not true. Our kids, some of them are outside playing. Some of them are upstairs in their bedrooms. Some of them are in the playroom. Sometimes they're in the living room. Sometimes they're in the kitchen. They're kind of all over, like ants. They're all over the place. So they can absolutely get time to themselves when they want it and if they need it. And that's something that we encourage. Like if we can see that they are mentally struggling or having a hard time playing with siblings, like if there's just like a lot of squabbles, then we will say like, you know, it looks like you need some time to yourself. We all need that from time to time. Go take five minutes upstairs in your room, read a book, lay down, relax. Just take some time to yourself. We all need that. And sometimes I put myself in timeout. I'm like, go get in your bed under the covers and take your cup of coffee and chill out for a minute. We all just need a minute. And I feel like that's true whether you have one kid or 10 kids. How do you actively help your kids to grow good character? I'm gonna talk about that in that chores and allowance and stuff video because that's a big element of it. The short answer to that is, I believe that those things are modeled, that kids are mirrors more than they are anything else. And so when they see us behaving in a certain way, when they see us acting in a certain way or treating people a certain way, they're going to model what they see. Now, there will be times that obviously they go their own way down some lone dusty road that you're like, why, where did you learn that? Mostly, I just believe that modeling good character and good choices is the best way that I can help my kids to make those same choices. What are things you invested in that made it easier, products, services, et cetera? We've talked about this before. We, in the last few months, have started doing a laundry service that we do. We haven't done it actually in a couple of weeks, but usually we do it about once a week. And it's not all of our laundry by any means, but it definitely helps. It's four loads, essentially. They take one big bag, it's a 40-pound bag of laundry. They pick it up off your porch, they take it, they wash it, they dry it, they fold it, they return it to your porch the next day, all beautifully folded, and it's 35 bucks. So we've been utilizing that. And then we do have a cleaning lady that comes once a week, and she just does our floors and the bathrooms. And we have loved having that help. But with so many kids, I mean, we are still absolutely cleaning all the time, every day. Do you think in some ways it's actually easier to have more kids? I think this is a great question and one that's not talked about enough. Because yes, I think when you have, like I said, that kind of two or three younger kids, those really little kids, it can be easy to look at a family with eight children and think, oh my gosh, that's just completely overwhelming. I don't know how you do that. But the reality is, is that you didn't just, in most cases, wake up one day with eight kids. You kind of, you know, you added them along the way, and along the way, you became more and more equipped for them. But I do think that as far as things being easier, there are absolutely, there's eight kids, guys. Like, there's always somebody to play with. Like, they don't come to me and say, well, sometimes they say, I'm bored. But it's rare, okay? It's really rare. Because most of the time, there's just always somebody to play with. There's something to do. You wanna play a board game? Go grab a couple siblings. You wanna play outside? Go grab a couple siblings. You wanna ride bikes? You wanna color? There's just always somebody to do something with. And our kids across our age spans are still playing together for the most part. So that is, it does make things easier because I'm not feeling like I have to entertain them as much or come up with things for them to do. You know what I mean? Like, they entertain themselves pretty well. Do children adapt to being one of many and become more independent naturally? It's hard to say if they are, you know, more or less, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, I know what I know, which is having eight kids or having a larger family. But I will say that our children are, in my opinion, for their ages and different, you know, circumstances and stuff, are pretty independent, learning to do things for themselves. I did a morning routine video recently and there was a couple of comments from people being like, well, you seem to do all of this stuff for the toddlers and the baby, but what about the other kids? Or, you know, feeling sorry for the older kids that I didn't do as much for them as I did for the babies. And it kind of makes me laugh because I'm like, y'all, if I had to babysit every moment or every little thing with eight kids, you're right, I would be exhausted. I would never get anything done. My hope is that I'm not raising children that need me to do everything for them until they're 13 years old. Like, that's bananas. So my goal is that, yeah, you bet your hiney, like if my six-year-old, my two eight-year-olds, my 11 and 13-year-old can get themselves dressed and brush their teeth and hair, and in some cases, depending on the day, make themselves breakfast, or my oldest will make breakfast for herself and extra for her younger siblings or whatever. Yeah, I want my kids to learn to be independent and to do things for themselves. I'm their mom, I'm not their maid. So yeah, there's some things I'm gonna do, but there's other things that they can do for themselves and I want them to do for themselves. So yes, I do think that it can, in some ways, help foster a little more independence. How do you do it all? You seem to be a superwoman. I am gonna take a page out of Jordan Page's book because I recently watched her Q&A where someone said the same thing to her, and I just completely agree with everything she said. I'm not superwoman, I'm not superhuman. Nobody is, and remembering that you're only seeing parts of people's lives, and I've made a very conscious choice that I do not show my children online in a way that is embarrassing for them, so I'm not going to show them having tantrums and things like that. I try my best, I'm not perfect. I'm certain that things have slipped through the cracks, and I'm human, and so are they. And so, with that being said, when you're not seeing all of that stuff, I do think it can be easy to assume that it's not happening, but that's absolutely not true. That's not the case. We are all dealing with the same kind of struggles and things with kids. As same as Jordan, I get help. I get help where I need it. I'm not ashamed to ask for help. I'm not ashamed to utilize help. Because I am a working mom and a homeschool mom, I utilize help when and where I need it, and as I could afford it along the way. Like I said, I didn't just come out the gate with eight kids and all of that. Over the last 13 years, as we've added more children, as our jobs have changed, as our financial situation has changed, we've been able to add more help and things like that. So it's definitely an ebb and a flow, but I am by no means superhuman, superwoman, or any of those things. I have the same struggles as everybody else. But I think the biggest thing to remember for you as a mom watching this who are maybe feeling that way, maybe you're reading some of these comments, maybe you're scrolling through Instagram and you're seeing things and you're feeling less than, it's so important to remember that you are enough. You are more than enough for your children. Your children believe that you hung the moon. It's such a short, precious time we get with them, and I wanna do my best not to waste any of it beating myself up for things, trying to be a certain type of mom that I think I should be or that I see online when it's not reality. I just want to show up every day and be the best mom I can to my kids and our situation, and I think that's all that anybody can ask of themselves. Question of homeschool. Kids who don't listen and fight you. How much school do you really do daily? We do school four days a week, and usually, it depends. In total, there's schoolwork happening from early morning until late afternoon. So it's hard to say exactly. I sit down and do group subjects for about three hours in the morning, and then the kids have a lot of independent subjects that they do by themselves, and my husband is helping with some of our younger kids during that time as well. So it's kind of all hands on deck. As far as how we deal with kids who fight on doing school, that's a little tougher to answer because it really, for me, depends on the kid, their age, what they're fighting, why they're fighting it. Do you know what I mean? It's gonna be different for a 13-year-old who just doesn't feel like reading this book I gave her versus a seven-year-old who feels like they don't understand what they're learning, and so they just kind of don't wanna do it because they don't understand or they're struggling or something like that. So that one's a little harder to answer in a nutshell just because it really depends on the child, the age, and the reason behind why they're fighting you for school because there's a reason, and you kinda need to get to the bottom of that first. All right, last question. Did you always want a big family, and do you come from one? Do not come from a big family. I grew up for the first 13, 14 years of my life with one sister who is 13 months older than me. Her name is Ashley. She has a channel here on YouTube as well. When we were 13 and 14 years old, my parents decided to have another child, and so we have a younger sister, Savannah, who is just wrapping up college. So I didn't come from a big family. My husband was an only child, so he did not come from a big family either. And as far as did I always know I wanted one, it's kinda funny because I talk about this in my book and I kinda go into more detail, a little bit about my childhood and what kind of got me to this place of having kids and married and figuring out how many kids we were gonna have and stuff like that. But the truth is that for a long time, I didn't even know if I wanted to have kids at all. I just wasn't even really sure if having kids was for me. And again, there's a lot more detail about all this in my book, but once Christopher and I got married, and we did decide that we did want to have kids, and I think that we thought we would have three or four kids. That was kind of like our initial thought. We felt like we would have a big family and that would look like three or four kids because in our minds that's what constituted a big family, was three to four kids. So it's just funny, there's just so much to that story and how we went from, kind of how I went from not wanting any kids at all in my younger years to now having eight kids. If you want all those details, you can pre-order my book. There's a link down below in the description box. It comes out April 28th, but you can pre-order it now. So, shameless plug, that will be linked down below if you guys wanna check that out as well. But that's it for today's Q&A. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I do have some more big family content planned and coming up. I'm gonna share some of our routines. I'm gonna share some stuff about chores and allowance and continuing to share with you guys kind of meal planning stuff. So I have a lot more of big family type of content to share with you guys coming up. So be sure to subscribe if you have not already. That's it for today's video, guys, and I will see y'all again very soon. Bye. ♪ Please don't leave just yet, oh Susanna ♪ ♪ I can't think of going on without you ♪