Large Family Stories/Living with a person with leukemia

Ah, this I have very personal experience with. I have five siblings, both parents, and now I have a brother-in-law and a nephew who would come over often. I was six years younger than the oldest and six years older than the youngest. And my mom had... Seven siblings, I think. Anyway, a lot of the times it depends on what the parents are like. My parents were rather laid-back, they didn't treat anyone as a favorite. I lived in a house with three bedrooms. I shared a room most of my life, with the sister I didn't get along with. -.- What happens is that, as the older ones become more capable, they start helping out with the younger ones. Or at least, they're expected to. That and movies restrictions lessen as the youngers ones get older. Suddenly, a middle child(me) had to wait for Lord of the Rings until she was thirteen, but the youngest was, like, eight when she watched it.

Going to restaurants was expensive, and I lived in a middle-class household. At sit-down restaurants, they'd often had to put two tables together for a 'party' of eight. At fast-food places, we'd get things off the dollar menu. Also, we'd go to renaissance stuff in full grab, which was pretty fun. But it's really hard when there are only two people who know how to drive and have cars, but five people need to get five different places at the same time. Also, hand-me-downs are a staple for these families, unless they're filthy rich.

My oldest brother got into wrestling(the sport, not the stupid "pro" stuff) in eighth grade, so sometimes he'd practice holds on me and my younger sister, though he was supposed to give a quarter each time he did that... I never did get any quarters. Sometimes my sisters and I would tackle each other for ticklefests on the long couch. Also, the youngest tries to be as connected with the older ones as much as possible.

Oh, this is an absolute must. School stories. I've gotten several of the same teachers as my older sibs, or met those who know them. 'Oh, you're so-an-so's sister, aren't you?' The never-ending question, followed by 'You two really look a like'. I was riding my bike when I was little and two random guys asked, "Are you ----'s sister?", they were right. Also name-mishaps. My parents would get mixed up in who they'd be calling. They'd go through all the sisters and finally say 'Whoever you are'. I was once called by my younger sister's name by one of my teachers. It was embarressing. Another story, my older and younger sister cut their hair and got perms. So, my older sister comes with my parents and I to a recital I was performing at and a girl I talked to starts talking to my older sister as if she was the younger one. For your story, try to consider how similar they look, it can really make a difference in how they're greeted by people who know the family.

I've never lived with someone who had leukemia, but my other brother has mild-severe autism. I think the family would have been very different if it he hadn't been born with that. These sorts of things really test the patience of family members. They usually either create a certain closeness or tear the family apart. They are very emotional strings attached when someone is in a family with a child with a disease/cancer/disorder. For example, I was looking through a pile of Time magazines and found one with an article about autism. Guess which one I took to my seat. Also, siblings tend to build a sort of defensive side for their afflicted ones. It's a thing that really impacts families, no matter the size. A trend I've noticed about families who go through things like that become a little more spiritual, more likely to believe in God.

... Sorry if this is kind of long.

I am the mother of 9, from 18 down to 2. They all still live at home.

When we go out with all of them, we certainly get a lot of stares. There was a time when we used to see people counting as we passed. Either it no longer happens, or I just don't notice anymore. We get our share of comments, and they're almost always positive, though I know plenty of large families have had the opposite experience.

Taking them all out for the Chinese buffet costs over $70. Taking them to Valley Fair took the entire $250 my mil gave us just to take them all out somewhere. Needless to say, going out as a family is a BIG treat that only happens once or twice a year.

I guess I could say everything is 'bigger' in a big family: our hallway has shoes lined up from the front door all the way to the kitchen. Our table is 108" long, and we still have to use benches to fit everyone. Our van is a 15 passenger 'church van.' Our laundry room has a set of three shelves, each about 8' long, and a basket for each person in the family, in addition to baskets for linens, kitchen towels, socks, etc. We buy the same brand/style of socks each time to simplify matching (imagine matching 77 pairs of socks every week!)

The kids get a kick out of telling people how many brothers and sisters they have. They love seeing the reactions. Also, it often brings up interesting stories from other people about their families: when our youngest was born, my hospital room was like Grand Central Station, with hospital personnel who had heard about that woman having her 9th child literally coming in just to introduce themselves and tell me about their large family, or a sibling or cousin's large family, and how much they had enjoyed it.

Overall, though, I feel we're a very normal family. People think it must be constant chaos around here. Sometimes it is. We had the week where the middle boys decided to harpoon the play house and instead harpooned one of the little boys. We had the week where the two oldest went charging through the house fighting and one of them ended up with a broken foot. And another where one of them put a foot through a wall in the midst of the chase. (Grandpa came over and they learned to patch a wall.) But plenty of times, it's very quiet. The four youngest boys will play out in their dirt pile or sandbox all day, building roads and castles and bridges and what not, a couple others will be off at friends' houses, one of them might be out with my parents for whatever reason, and the rest in their bedrooms reading, or talking on the phone.

One thing particular to large families is that there aren't a lot of us, relatively speaking, and it's a really strange feeling to find a large family forum where I'm just like everyone else, and in fact, one of the smaller families. But large family forums also attract a lot of trolls, and particularly stupid ones. They claim to have two sets of twins and a set of triplets, and when you actually look at the birthdates of these children, you find that the woman was pregnant with her triplets two months before she gave birth to the twins, or something really stupid like that. So you find that in certain situations, you almost have to produce pictures to reassure people you're for real.

I've had only a few rude responses over the years: "what ever possessed you to have that hassling of children??" and a lot of "You do know what causes that, don't you?" (No... I went to high school in the 80's and didn't manage to figure that out. :rolleyes:) Mostly, though, I think people mean well and just want to talk about something that is unusual, so I've had some really obnoxious comments that actually don't bother me. For instance, I had a dentist who was so enthusiastic about our many children, and would come and show me pictures of another his families with a bunch of kids. Then one day, he was trying so hard to be funny, and said his brother has six kids, but he himself only has three because he has a college degree and knows what causes that! I smiled and said, "I have a master's degree." Mostly we get very positive comments about how blessed we are or compliments on the kids' behavior. People also seem to feel a need to tell me why they didn't have more, which sometimes get old. We don't have a ton of money, either, but they certainly don't owe me any excuse, and I've never quite understood why I get that response. From older people, I am more likely to hear that they wish now that they had more.

If you have any questions, just ask. Feel free to pm.

Totally agreed with the above two stories. I have 5 siblings so 8 of us in total with my parents. My dad has 6 siblings as well, and two of them have large families (10 and 8 kids). Extended family get togethers are CRAZY! and a little intimidating for significant others. This Thanksgiving I brought my boyfriend to Thanksgiving. One of the little cousins asked him when he was changing his last name to mine. We laughed and said that's not how it works! And my cousin responded that he couldn't be there unless we were married. (There are definitely strong feelings about family ties!)

The hard part really is the weird looks and the comments about human bunnies or reproduction machines and the assumption that we must therefore be a poor Irish Catholic family. (I'm half Chinese...honestly!) I think this definitely serves to make the siblings closer together though, no matter how much infighting there might be. The neat thing was that no matter what the discussion or topic was, you always have people agreeing and disagreeing. And then everyone switches sides when a new topic comes up. When we were little we'd go back and forth from friends to mortal enemies and back again. It was like a complex Survivor-esque alliance structure

In my family, our age range is very similar....8 years apart from oldest to youngest. We didn't actually go out for dinner or expensive (for us) amusements that often as a lot of the money went towards ensuring that we were in good schools and paying off the mortgage. My mom got really good at finding out free entertainment - like free day at the national exhibition, or family fun day at the amusement park, etc.

My sister and I went to the same school, and I was a couple of years ahead of her, but I had done all the extra curricular stuff - math competitions, student council, sports teams, etc - so everyone knew me pretty well. So when she went through everyone called her by my name. She was so pissed off!

I come from a largeish family (6 kids) and our closest friends have large families as well (9 and 12 kids). It's overall been a wonderful experience. My grandfather, great-grandmother and aunt all eventually died from leukemia so I know about that.....
One of the hard parts is the bone marrow transplants. My aunt was 34 when she died of leukemia; her brother and father had bone marrow taps and platelet harvesting frequently; platelet harvesting was every other day (i.e. brother one day, dad the next, for 8 hours per day). The fear that it could be "anytime" is the worst..........and "remission" is right behind it. Remission is really just another word for, "We can't find any right now but it will be back worse when it comes back." It's the one time when you can relax a little between treatments, but then you wonder....will it be 2 hours or 2 years before it comes back? In my case, with my grandfather, he was in remission for two years, and then between a Sunday night and a Thursday morning the cancer had completely overtaken his body. They removed life support on Friday night. By that time, after the long fight, it was, in a way, relieving although totally unexpected. (He was relatively young, buff, and handled chemo and radiation like a ride at Disneyland.)
Not knowing is hardest.

Large families: I am one of 10. Going out - TONS of "Are they all yours?" but that was more when we were little. Now that half of us are in our twenties, people don't tend to make as many comments (except for the constant: "OH MY GOSH, You have GOT to be sisters!" because, apparently, we look so much alike). All ten of us kids have blue eyes, so the other line we've heard forever and ever is "Look at allll those beautiful blue eyes!" The other thing is, people tend to identify us as "You must be a [last name]" - instead of our first names. One person even commented, after getting to know us all better, "I'm so surprised, you all have different personalities!" - as if we are all clones. Believe it or not, we are each very different people...

We are a musical family and love to sing together (seven girls, three boys). Once, years ago, we went to a nursing home to visit my great-aunt and ended up singing a song for her. On the way out, we passed a nurses' station and one of my sisters heard one nurse say, "Is that a school group?" to which another nurse replied, "No, it's a choir!"

Speaking of going out as a family, forget ever eating out together - unless the family is really, really rich. One other thing you might want to consider in your story is practical things like - how many bedrooms? how many bathrooms? I have never had my own room - I just recently moved from sharing a room with 2 sisters to sharing with only 1 - and let me tell you, it is *amazing* the difference it made. SO much less crowded! We have 2.5 baths in our house - one of which is the master bath, which isn't always available. So that means 1 bathroom (i.e. 1 shower!) for all the "kids" to share, every morning/evening. That can cause a lot of drama. Most of the time we work around each other and it's not a big deal, but there's the occasional "high drama" day when someone sleeps too late and is late to school or work and NEEDS THE SHOWER RIGHT NOW but someone else is in there ... and then it's banging on the door and "I NEED THE SHOWER RIGHT NOW!!! GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM" and all that.

On a more "warm and fuzzy" note, it really is a blast having a large family. There are definitely days when we want to strangle each other, but we are all very close, and having a big family has made us all more flexible and selfless than we might otherwise be. So it's good. I can't imagine having only five or fewer siblings ... even now, when there are only a few of the "kids" home, the house feels empty. We're a big, crazy family ... living together mostly peacefully... most of the time. :)

I'll start with the leukemia thing, because it seems like less people have spoken about that.
My youngest brother had cancer, but it wasn't leukemia. But in a large family the oldest child (without the disease) often ends up suddenly getting a lot of responsibility thrust on them because the parents are too busy. The rest of the children all find different ways to deal. The younger ones act more immature and often cling to their parents when they are home. The older ones will lock themselves in a room alone for a lot of the time, but when someone does have a problem the family is more likely to come through than other wise. When the patient isn't in the hospital, the rest of the family will take extra care of them, what they want comes first.
Hope that helped.

My family is a little smaller than that, I'm the oldest of four from 16 to eight, but we are close to six of our cousins making the age range from 3 to 16.
Going out all together is insane, usually it ends up being the ten children with the three mothers, but ocassionally the fathers and our grandfather will come. For example yesterday we went apple picking. There were four injuries resulting from the pole they give you to pick the high apples, more than six full on apple throwing wars, one frantic search for the youngest, (3 years old) three or four fist fights between siblings, two frantic searches for the teenagers (me, my brother and two cousisn. 2-14, 2-16), one not-so-frantic search for our grandfather, more than ten fights over why the older kids could climb the trees but no one would let the younger kids, one incident where me, my fourteen year old cousin, and my eight year old brother sat in the wagon while my 3 year old cousin insisted on pulling us. The number of dirty looks we got is not calculatable my modern mathmaticians.

I loved reading all that, especially the part explaining how it is not always chaotic like people think. I am the mom of six children and my oldest is 7, and people really think that it must be a mad house all the time. I find it more difficult when for some reason I just have one or two of them!
I have two special shirts, both of which were given to me. One is a maternity shirt which says on the front: "Yes, I know what causes this..." and on the back it says "...and I like it!" I love that shirt but don't wear it out, lol. The other shirt says, "Birth control is for sissies."

The only thing I have to add here is the sheer amount of food you have to buy, make, have on hand, etc. Not to mention the giant cookware it sometimes takes, when tripling or quadrupling recipes.

Stormimay

Ha, I just thought of something else: lots of people, even friends and family don't want to invite your family over. They don't have enough room, don't want to make that much food, is afraid that it will be a mad house and your kids will destroy everything (even if you have good kids), etc. Then you have great friends who invite all of you over or to go somewhere even if they don't have kids or just have one or two. My best friend is like that.
There are also the other large families you meet who will invite you over, with the result of having 4 adults to 15 kids, or something like that. That's fun. Seriously, it is. Yes, the adults get to talk some, because with so many kids everyone has someone to play with!

For living woth a sibling having leukemia, you could try to read "My sister's keeper" - it's about a girl who actually has been born to save her sister from that disease, and as it goes on quite a while, she finally decides to sue her parents. That may not be so interesting for you, but actually there are chapters from different points of view - the mother, the father, Anna (MC), Kate (her sister, who's sick), Jesie (her brother), but also the lawyer Anna goes to and her guardian at lithem (?). So it's quite interesting to see the dynamics of a family where one kid has a severe form of leukemia and the parents are desperate to save her.
In a less severe case, it could probably be close to that in less extreme. And of course it's just an example, it can be completely different.

As for having many siblings: I'm the oldest of 9, and we are aged between 24 and 2 - so actually sometimes it's like two generations, the 4 "older ones" and the 5 "younger ones". We older ones tend to act a bit too much like parents, always trying to educate the younger ones. Sometimes that's a bit problematic.
Every position in the family has advantages and inconvenients: the oldest one gets new bikes, clothes, toys, etc., but at some time has to help much more at home and also take care a little about the smaller siblings. The youngest gets attention from everyone and sometimes gets a little spoiled (I tend to buy sweets for the little ones quite often when I go somewhere with them), but at the same time they have to use the old bikes and toys and sometimes clothes. And a middle position sometimes combines having to help at home and wearing the older sibling's clothes etc. But of course it depends quite a lot, and for example my mother tries to give each of us some time with her on our own - for example she takes my brother out to eat some ice-cream (he's 7) or goes to buy furnitures for my other brother (20), or just sits together with me to watch TV and drink a glass of wine.

To comment a bit on Katharina's post-- about kids in large families getting individual attention. That's a huge question among many parents. I think kids in large families get plenty of attention, and sometimes I think they're protected from our current society's tendency towards over-attention.

For example, in the course of a day, I spend time with kids individually or in smaller groups when I'm driving them somewhere, when we're running errands, when we're doing chores together, when they first come in from school, before bed, while reading bedtime stories, while walking the kindergardeners to school, when changing a diaper or giving baths, helping with homework, at dinner, at lunch... the list goes on. But they not only get attention from me, they get attention from each other. The oldest will play with the 2 year old, throwing him up in the air, jumping down the stairs with him, chasing him around the house, etc.

It's a bit of a parody in places, but you might enjoy "Cheaper by the Dozen"-- there are days like that, lol! I do recall a friend telling me (back when I had a small family of only 4 or 5) how a mother of 10 we knew was so laid back she was almost comatose. I don't think so. Her kids were actually very well behaved, and I think she had just learned to put things in perspective. Milk spills, it's no crisis, just clean it up.

Another movie I like that I think shows very normal life in a large family is the original "Yours, Mine, and Ours."

Wow, this is a topic just for me! I am the oldest of seven children ages 10-19 - so three years ago, 7-16. It's 4:55am right now, so I have to get some sleep, but I promise I'll be back on here tomorrow or the next day and give you some descriptions/stories.

Define the type of leukaemia - childhood leukaemia - ALL, AML ?

different types have different methods of treatment, to some extent, and some have higher life expectancies. I can get you a load of info about it, but have no *personal* experience of living with someone with leukaemia (just come into contact with families that have children with it, as the business I work for is partially funded by CwL (Children with Leukaemia, a UK based charity).

I'm from the small end of a large family. I'm one of five.

Though I don't have any experience with leukemia in a large family, I do have experience with a sudden, life-threatening, medical emergency that required surgery, long hospitalization and rehab for the my twin sister, the oldest sibling.

Initially, anyway, I was in complete shock. Both my parents were with her, and I was at a relatives' house. My youngest brother (only a year and a half old at the time) stayed with the sitter for the first 24 hours. I remember not seeing him for maybe a day. My other two brothers, (who were 12 and 11) reacted completely differently. The older was in complete denial, and immediately fabricated what he was sure our parents were really doing. Instead of staying in the waiting room to see if his sister was going to live through surgery. He insisted on controlling what he could, I guess. He went to school functions that he was supposed to, even though it was put as an option that he wouldn't have to go. The 11-year-old (at just barely 11) sat in the living room, obediently doing his homework. Later that night, when we knew she had made it through surgery and I was going to the hospital to visit, he very much wanted to go, too.

In the days following, I was at the hospital 24-7. My baby brother was in all kinds of upheaval, and actually ended up getting weaned off a bottle at night during this time, because Mom wasn't there to give it to him. My 12-year-old brother didn't handle things well. The grandparents came and stayed at the house, and he made trouble and was rude to them. My 11-year-old brother, knowing that I had always shared a room with my sister, offered to let me sleep in his room (in his bed) while he voluntarily slept on the floor.

So I think it just depends on the personality of your characters. And the family they come from.