Forget maintaining software, I want to know how you maintain your existence. I don't think I could survive.
Once you have two, you stop caring as much about the first precious one - because you have two precious ones. So sometimes one has to wait.
Repeat that a few times, and you'll arrive at your answer.
With more kids, it becomes clear that there are things you simply cannot do, e.g. own a 11-bedroom house or drive each single kid to soccer. So the kids will have to do something else. Like playing with each other.
That's just the way it is.
There's virtually no free time, though. :)
At ten kids I guess you have a - somewhat misbehaving - staff. Half of the kids are capable to help out with the other half or other chores at the house. All they need is a manager :)
I cannot say much about the personal time though - I'm still in the 'learn to walk and talk' phase and with 3 toddler in a small house there is virtually none. However I read on reddit that after 20 years every kid be at some kind of university and I finally will have free time for playing games and talking to my wife. That sounds nice:)
I realised I no longer had any spare time anymore once I had my first daughter. Then we had another and I realised I must have had so much spare time with just the one kid...
How lots of my family and friends manage time with 3 or more kids I don't know as you are then outnumbered.
5 or more seems impossible. You must either be a drill sergeant super efficient or the opposite, super relaxed and let the kids sort themselves out. Or rich and delegate it to nannies/au-pair etc.
I do appreciate now that by having two kids that they mostly spend their time at home playing with each other, as opposed to when we had just the one when we had to always play with them. I guess that scales well with more kids.
But I still do feel guilty that I am not always joining in. And have to be more selective of which school performance etc either one of us can attend. I am not sure my conscience could handle missing out on lots of these with more kids by allocating much less of my full time to each kid.
From two to three children... nothing really changes anymore! You won't get more responsibilites as you already have them and no less time as you already don't have any :)
The traditional way is to delegate age-appropriate amount of caring for the younger children to the older children.
But if you are already making 2 school lunches, how much longer is 5 really? You are already making breakfast lunch and dinner each day, how hard is it to add more food really. There is cost involved but making the meal isn't that much harder, at least for us.
It's just my wife and I, her staying home, without staff or personal time. We homeschool them until they can get a 3 or better for AP Chemistry or AP Biology. My kids get funny looks going in for those tests at age 10 to 12. After that, as early as 6th grade, they can start dual-enrollment at the local college. It's free until high school graduation, which is sometimes enough time to get an AA degree. We don't do organized sports, but they all have unicycles. There are some organized activities to attend: scouting (BSA and AHG), a homeschooling group that does history/gym/art/writing together, a free band day camp in summer, and a big road trip every few years.
I only have 4 bedrooms. I ended up putting the kids all in a much bigger room, leaving the bedrooms for other purposes. More interesting is the "car", with 5 rows of seats. It is 3 tons empty, 5 tons full. We go through 2 gallons of milk per day. I can spend $1000 on 3 or 4 carts of groceries. We can finish a pair of chickens or a mid-size turkey in one sitting.
I haven't had much luck turning kids into programmers. At one point I got several to enjoy Scratch, but then I found that the computers were severely abused to waste time on junk like the "Tanki Online" video game and the "Annoying Orange" videos. I had to take away the computers. Recently kid #2, age 17, decided to choose the career. I've mostly taught him C now. He does that on Ubuntu and for his TI-84 Plus CE. I think this has created a programming aversion in some other kids, because they saw how excited I got to be finally teaching C and didn't want to spend all their time with me. For the oldest 5 the career choices are unknown (hurry up...), programmer, lawyer (physics undergrad), unknown, and midwife. BTW, programming the TI-84 Plus CE in C is pretty wild. You get a 24-bit int.
It helps to be close to work. I'm less than a mile away, 3 minutes by car or maybe 16 if walking. It helps to work only 40 hours per week, with an extremely flexible schedule.
Right now the main source of stress is kids wandering away from homework and chores. I don't want to have to stand over them in one room, waiting and watching as they work. I want to go do other things.
> How many soccer games do you attend in a given week?
One: souprock's kids + one friend vs. some other team.
They just have to grow up the time-tested traditional way through play, discovery, and experience. Shame really, brings a tiny tear to my eye.
10 dependents who are legal minors (includes a set of twins)
1 adult dependent who ought to move out soon
1 miscarriage
1 unborn
There are eight possible ways to count that up. The resulting sum is 10, 11, 12, or 13.