I come from what most people around here consider a huge family. In total, the house I grew up in contained five girls, five boys, and a ever-changing multitude of cats, dogs, rabbits, and other assorted creatures. And no, we're not Mormon. Nor are we Catholic, the next question everyone asks after, "Wow! Ten kids! Are you Mormon or something?" The only people I've ever met who don't think my family is weirdly enormous are my students from large immigrant families. After years of being the only person I knew who had so many siblings, I'm surrounded these days by young adults who are the sixth of fourteen kids or the oldest of nine.

Being part of a family that was considered a local curiosity had its downsides, of course. Going out to dinner was a rarity; a large party with two adults and ten kids (even though we weren't truly all kids at the same time) was always seen as an imposition by the wait staff. Fitting everyone in could sometimes be tricky, too. Once, on a family trip to Disneyland, two of my brothers had to take the train from Sacramento to Los Angeles because the family van didn't have enough seats for all of us to make the drive together.

We frequently attracted odd looks, partly because there were so many of us and partly because with three white kids, three Korean kids, three Brazilian kids, and one Guatemalan sister, people spent a lot of time sending us furtive looks, trying to puzzle us out. Were we a group home? A foster family? A school? These were the guesses we heard; I'm sure there were others. These days, everyone has a cousin or a friend who has adopted a baby girl from China, but twenty-three years ago, when my parents adopted their first Korean daughter, international adoption was relatively rare, and so strangers were perplexed by why children of every hue were calling our white parents "Mom" and "Dad."

Odd looks aside, I love being a part of a big family. We're no Von Trapp family—as Chip has noted, we're collectively the worst group of singers he's ever heard, and he frequently wonders if I married him just so he could lead us in singing "Happy Birthday" at our many family birthday parties—but we're a clan I'm grateful to belong to.

Like any big family, ours breaks down into smaller groups: my brother Matt and I, the oldest two of the three biological kids, share memories of the earlier years of my parents' marriage, while Jeff, Meghan, Karin, and Eric are the kids I still think of as the middle children. Alex, William, and Taina, my Brazilian-born siblings, are in their twenties now, but I can't help still calling them "the little kids," the name we seem to have given them when they joined our family at ages 5, 6, and 9. And Cat, the baby of the family, is nineteen now, but she'll always be the youngest.

As an introverted person living in a crowd, I thought moving out and living with just one person (my boyfriend at the time, Kelly), would be heaven. The quiet of our little house terrifed me, however. It turned out I didn't know how to be truly alone. I'd turn the TV on for background noise or go to coffee shops to study, having found that all my complaining about how my parents' house was too noisy and distracting for me to be able to concentrate might have been unfair. I'd never lived in such a small household. For the first few months we lived together, Kelly would wonder why I'd cooked an entire jumbo pack of spaghetti and two huge jars of sauce for the two of us. I'd reduced what I usually cooked at my parents' home, but not enough, apparently.

While I've gotten better at gauging how much pasta to cook, I'm still learning how my ideas about parenting and life were shaped by being part of such a big family. When Vincent started school and had to take a lunch each day, Chip horrified me by asking him each night what kind of sandwich he wanted. Did he want mustard on it? Cheese? A pickle? What kind of juice box would he like? I'd listen, gritting my teeth, until finally I had to say it. "Don't give him all those choices! What are you, crazy? You want to be asking three kids for their special orders for the next ten years?"

Chip, the only child of his parents' marriage and the much younger brother of three doting sisters, was equally appalled. "What? I'm just asking him what kind of lunch he wants. What's the big deal?" Huh. What WAS the big deal? After all, if Chip wanted to make Vincent's lunch to order every day, that was his decision. Making lunches for all the kids, a rotating household chore when I was growing up, wasn't quite the arduous task I still thought of it as when "the kids" consisted of one first-grader. (Once the number of lunches to be made increased to three, however, we did institute the "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit" rule, a decision made in perfect parental harmony.)

When our kids squabble, Chip and I often have opposite reactions. Since he grew up as the only small child in the family, he's often horrified by the constant vying for the favorite couch seat and the endless races to be the first one to open the door that I view as part and parcel of life in a family. He has a positive view of the possibilities of intervention; surely, if he just explains reasonably why their fights are silly, they'll stop.

My perspective is slightly more resigned; I'll break in to lower the volume of the arguing, and I don't tolerate hitting or bullying of younger siblings, but ultimately I'm not going to expend a ton of energy trying to keep my kids from fighting with each other. Rules and routines like the one my younger siblings hated—oldest child in the car rides shotgun—are the lifelines for parents of multiple children. Yelling "That's enough!" and threatening timeouts and/or the loss of certain privileges is also a strategy I'm willing to employ when necessary.

For better or worse, though, my kids aren't growing up in a family like the one I grew up in. I don't have it in me to parent ten kids—god knows my respect for my parents increases every day as I struggle to manage three kids. There is much to like about having a smaller family. For one, money and time are not quite as scarce. Financial stability, while unromantic, goes a long way toward decreasing stress on a marriage. Being able to spend one-on-one time with each kid AND have a little left for myself is a good thing; while my mom managed to make time for all of us, I think she did it by sacrificing her free time, as well as her sleep. I honestly believed, for years, that all parents slept about four hours a night, because that seemed to be the average amount of sleep my parents got when I was growing up.

But sometimes I look at my kids and wonder about what they're missing, and whether they're a little spoiled. They'd hasten to argue, and compared to many of their peers' families, we live a somewhat spartan life, but they've never shopped at the Canned Food Outlet, and they get new clothes from Old Navy and Target—sometimes clothes that aren't even on sale, for god's sakes. They each have their own bedroom, something most of my siblings had to move out to get, and we're hopeful, barring any catastrophes, that we'll be able to help them through college. And you can't begin to imagine what Christmas and birthdays look like around here, given that our kids are the only grandchildren so far and have thirteen aunts and uncles, not to mention several great-aunts and great-uncles and three great-grandparents, all of whom like to shower gifts upon our household.

There's also the overwhelming whiteness of this little family of ours. I spent my first few years as a stepmother and mother secretly grateful that we looked just like many of the other families in the neighborhood, but once I relaxed into parenthood a bit, my need to blend in dissipated. We live in California, and my kids go to public schools, so they're not going to live in lily-white ignorance of all other ethnicities and cultures, but they also won't be living with sisters and brothers whose first languages and skin color are a daily reminder that the world is much, much bigger than our little pseudo-suburban neighborhood.

They are, though, growing up with those sisters and brothers of mine as their aunts and uncles. Despite all my teenage complaints about having to babysit my younger siblings, I've been repaid beyond measure by those same siblings' willingness to care for my children. During Henry and Josie's baby and toddler years, my sisters Meghan and Karin were both college students. Despite having other jobs and busy class schedules, they were my kids' first regular babysitters during the afternoons when I was teaching. When my brother Matt was working on his master's degree, he put in hours as the most overqualified babysitter my kids have ever had. Leaving my very young children with people who love them as much as I do was an enormous relief to this anxious mother; my kids cried when I came home from work, not when I left, because they knew that when I showed up, that meant the fun auntie or uncle they'd been playing with would probably go home.

That feeling that family is a vast and loving resource is what I hope my children will have. Chances are they'll move away from this town all but a few of my family members still live in; maybe Henry will babysit Vincent's young children someday in the future, but realistically, I know the chances are slim. Despite Josie's pleas, I'm not willing to add a fourth child to our stretched-to-the-limits family. I'm banking on the promise of cousins, many, many cousins, in my kids' near future. While I don't want to pressure my siblings to procreate, I want to be an auntie. My brother Matt is getting married this July, and I owe him some free babysitting. Meghan and Karin are in line for some of that, too, and I'm sure my baby lust will encompass every niece and nephew I can get my hands on. So maybe, instead of a gang of siblings, my kids will have a clan of cousins. I hope so; it turns out I'm pretty much counting on cousins.