When I first heard about Andy Hammack and family last fall, it was through the regular column by GBC Executive Director J. Robert White. I only had the copy of the article first and hadn't seen a picture, so when I learned they had 10 kids, I assumed there were some twins or even triplets in there to help things get to that number, but no there weren't.
Something I can't believe I left out of the article is that neither Andy nor his wife, Elizabeth, come from big families. I want to say (from memory) that both of them had one sibling. Writing it up, I kept coming back to sports analogies. When I would play baseball with my brother and our neighbor growing up, we'd always use "ghost man" to fill in for us. In other words, one guy would bat, another pitch, and another field. If you hit a double, you called ghost man to run from second while you went to bat again. Rule was, though, that he could only advance as many bases as you got on the next hit, so for Casper to score from second you had to hit another double. Worked fairly well, actually.
Getting the lead on this one, I wanted the reader to get a feeling of being overrun. That's why I listed their typical order for McDonald's. Didn't make that up. Andy told me matter-of-factly. For a crew their size, I expected him and Elizabeth to sound a little more tired than they did. On the contrary, both had good senses of humor. I mentioned that today to get any kind of recognition for a high number of kids, they have to be born all at once following a merry-go-round of fertility drugs. If memory serves, the number to beat is eight. I don't even know what you'd call nine kids at once. Nintuplets?
That assumption I'm sure came from me taking everything about my three-year-old and multiplying it by 11. When she was an infant, it seemed I had more bags of weight on my back than Juan Valdez's pack mule just for us to go somewhere. The amount of plastic little possessed toys (see previous post) must be mind-boggling.
Both Andy and Elizabeth were quick to give a lot of credit to their older kids, particularly Nathan, Bethany, Mary and Sarah. I talked to Nathan and Bethany and they both seemed like good kids. I mentioned how Bethany and the older girls have taken to sewing which helps out with costs. It's not like they're made to though, it's just something they like to do, and have a knack for. Nathan likes baseball and is an Andruw Jones fan, a tidbit I wasn't able to fit into the story. For sure, they both are miles ahead of where I was in maturity and responsibilty at their ages.
Something else I picked up from writing this was the importance of perspective. To a lot of kids who get everything, they would cringe at the idea of having to share so much. A lot of parents, including myself, would initially think of things such as buying birthday/Christmas presents and how in the world to pay for everything rather than feel blessed with 11 beautiful kids. This family truly makes it with a team effort and closeness others on the outside wish they could have.
That being said, I still think I could only handle two, maybe three.
