Eight is enough

People watching is my favorite hobby. It’s much more interesting than bird watching, although the use of binoculars is frowned upon when one studies the sapiens species.

An increasingly rare sighting these days is a “Haggard Mom with a Large Brood in Tow.”

This shouldn’t warrant any extra attention, yet it does. Maybe it’s because I read some years ago that the average family had 2.3 children. I’ve heard of a child being called “a half pint.” Would that .3 of a kid get the nickname “third pint?”

The average family now has 1.94 kids. Back when I was young, it was not uncommon to see families with six children. My Nelson great-grandparents began a baker’s dozen of offspring.

Were this math extrapolated into the past, one might reach the conclusion that families of yore produced kids by the score. And they accomplished this feat the old-fashioned way, without help from the technology that gave rise to Octomom.

Having been part of a family that contained eight kids, I have nothing against large families. But I do have some insights about growing up in one.

For instance, it’s challenging to live in a household that has 10 people and only one bathroom. And by “challenging” I mean “often uncomfortable.”

This was especially true when my older sisters entered high school. For some reason, they began to spend inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, primping and preening and gussying up. You would think it was against the law to go to school smelling like a dairy barn. I may have been teased for that particular offense but was never arrested.

It sometimes got to the point where I thought my kidneys might explode. I would urgently convey this information to the bathroom’s occupant by shouting at the door and might receive a reply along the lines of “Go outside and water a tree!”

This is why the trees nearest our farmhouse did so well. But there were situations when watering a tree wouldn’t have solved my pressing problem. 

At such times I might have been informed by the bathroom’s tenant that our ancient privy was likely unoccupied. The trouble was that the old outhouse was cold and drafty in the wintertime and just plain yucky otherwise. Plus, its wood-based technology meant that the user faced the possibility of getting a splinter in a highly embarrassing place.

Another issue with growing up in a large family had to do with the dearth of entertainment. Disneyworld wasn’t an option, mainly because it was still just a figment of Walt’s imagination.

We had a television. But Dad was the sort of guy who believed that watching TV was an abomination, a nasty habit that put one on the slippery slope to mental enfeeblement.

So, we played indoors until the noise reached the level of a space shuttle launch. Our parents would then vociferously impress upon us that we should go outside and play.

We were thus forced to play outside. Not only that, but we also had to invent our own games. These days, the child welfare folks might be called if kids don’t have prearranged “play dates” and are simply left to romp in an unstructured manner.

But some of the best fun we had involved structures. An example of such a thing was building a maze of bale tunnels in the haymow.

Our bale tunnels became extremely elaborate with dead ends, chimneys, and sudden drop-offs. It was possible to lose a kid in our bale labyrinth, so a head count was required at the end of each day.

Our family believed in hand-me-downs when it came to clothing. As the oldest boy, the stuff I got was generally new — although I wondered about a shirt I wore in sixth grade that contained a suspicious amount of lace and buttoned the wrong way.

We also handed down our bicycles. We had two bikes for the entire family, the Big Bike and the Little Bike.

Kids learned to ride on the Little Bike. This was before training wheels had been invented, so the novice rider was simply placed on the bike, steadied, then gently launched down an incline.

This resulted in numerous spills, but no serious damage ever resulted. The bike was well protected by the legs of the learner.

I could go on, but you get the picture. And while we were underprivileged by today’s standards — kids nowadays think they’re desperately deprived if they don’t have a smartphone in their hands at all times — one thing is certain: growing up in a household of 10 people and one bathroom helped me hone a certain ability.

Just call me the Super Tree Soaker.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at [email protected].