Why I Have Grey Hair – My Kids and Pets!
Our family is unusual. I can prove it to you. First of all, we have seven sons. How many families have you heard of with that composition. We’re the only ones that I know of in my wide set of acquaintances. My husband, Steve, and I accomplished this by blending our two families. It’s not like I woke up one day, smacked my forehead, and said, “Why not have seven sons? Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
Actually, on most days, it’s more like living in a fraternity house. Think, ala Animal House.
Well, Benji, our 16-year-old, decided he NEEDED a snake for his birthday. (See previous post and pictures about this entitled Teenaged Boys & Snake Birthday Presents.)
) So he now has a 12-foot Burmese Python in the basement. But, it’s a new snake and he’s just figuring out how to feed it, care for it and cuddle it. (Yes, he usually cuddled it on the couch.)
One night, he buys a rat at the pet store and decides he’s going to feed the snake. He’s holding the rat, who takes one look at that hungry snake and it sinks it’s rat fangs into the fleshy part of Benji’s palm. Benji, of course, drops the rat. However, hungry snake didn’t catch the part about the rat getting away, so he chomps down on Benji’s hand, which smells suspiciously like a juicy rat.
I can just imagine the nurse at the pediatrician’s office rolling her eyes when we call in with a rat/snake bit kid. She probably thought it was a prank call. It wasn’t.
The doctor, who looked suspiciously like he was holding back a laugh, declared our son well, after an inspection of his hand. Gave us a prescription for antibiotics in case the rat or the snake had some nasty germs and sent us on our way.
He probably went right to the phone to call his doctor friends to say, “Hey Frank, you’ll never guess what kind of a case I had today….”
Go to the main page
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I love this story, you rock I think that one takes the cake!
Anyone who actually lives with seven sons has some stories to tell! I have more coming up in the next few months. Sign up for my RSS feed so you don’t miss any one of them. Thanks for reading!
Grey Hair — you don’t give your age, but large families were common 100 years ago. I’m 65 and the 7th in a family of 10 (3 girls and 7 boys). There are 7 (4 boys and 3 girls) in my wife’s family. There were 13 kids in my dad’s family. The first two were twins born in 1894. The last two were twins born in 1916. Both the first and last twins died shortly after birth, as did my grandmother with the last two. Only 7 kids survived childhood. I grew up with 3 older sisters, 3 older brothers and 3 younger brothers. My youngest brother was born in the same year my oldest sister gave birth to her first of five. Living in a big family can be a challenge, but also a lot of fun.
We got an “accidentally” big family. I was a single mom raising my three sons in Chicago when I met (through work) a widower raising his four boys in Atlanta. When you blend two families, like we did, we end up with a super-sized family of seven sons! It’s been challenging, fun, and more work than I ever imagined. Our oldest is 28 and our youngest are twins that just turned 16. On top of that, I live next door to my mother-in-law and her mother (my husband’s grandmother and our kid’s great-grandmother). Her birthday was on Feb. 8 and she just turned 104 years old. The doctor’s say she’s healthy and happy. So, we’re blessed by having family all around us. NEVER a dull moment.