Shocker

Jotted down last year, when we only, ahem, had seven kids.

We went to a family reunion this weekend. Everywhere around us people registered shock (sometimes very loud) at the number of children we had. "Seven! You have seven children?" was THE universal response to the revelation of our family size.

I'm very used to it by now. There's a stock set of chaser comments, too, the most common (to me) being "You have your hands full, don't you?" Every now and then, though, somebody diverges from this set ever so slightly. Today's made me laugh.

One older woman, bless her heart, seemed barely able to get over the size of our family. (You never would know by the attitude of this woman that in her generation large families were not unusual, or that the central family of this reunion--my grandmother and her siblings--was about twice that size.) She patted the baby in my arms and said sentimentally, "And this will be your last one." It wasn't a question, but an assumption. I said, "Maybe. We don't know." She looked as if she would swoon from disbelief. She drew a breath and said, "So you have seven...but you might have...eight?"