Cheaper by the baker's dozen

Chapter one: prologue

The start of everything.

Kate narrating
Thirteen is our number, it's the number my husband Tom coaches at Lincoln collage every season, It's the number of times we zero out the bank account each year to make ends meet, and the number of kids we try to keep track of.

Thirteen is an insane number of kids, but having a small family was never an option for us. See, Tom loved growing up with seven brothers and sisters and after my sister died, I spent most of my time wishing I had seven brothers and sisters.

Tom and I met Illinois polytechnic university. He was a senior dreaming of becoming the head football coach there. I was a freshman dreaming of becoming a sports reporter. He wanted nine kids I wanted nine kids. Bam.

An hour after I met him, I new he was the one. We just had family at the wedding. Oh, and , Tom's best man. What a hotdog.

A year later, we had our first – Nora. I loved taking her to work with me. After the first set of twins were born Charlie and Elizabeth as well as Loraine were born, we realised our dream living in the city, and of having eight kids and two careers wasn't going too work. As much as we wanted our big careers, we wanted our big family more. So, Tom settled for a division 3 coaching job at Lincoln, I quit writing for the tribute, and we moved to the country. Tom and I got busy when we moved too Midland. We had Henry, Sarah, Jake, and Mark in consecutive years. Then we went for magic number nine, and instead got the second set of twins – Jessica and Kim. Ten kids. With each child tom and I got further away from our big career dreams. But we didn't think about that. We had our hands full with nine. We were happy and we were done. Then we went to a party celebrating Shake Maguire's appointment to athletic director at our alma mater. And well to many beer and nine months late, we had mike. After that tom got a vasectomy. But he didn't hear the doctor say that it would be a few weeks before the procedure became effective. In 98' Nigel and Kyle got us to that crazy number 13. But by then tom and I were experts at managing chaos.