Father’s Day

Love Father’s Day. Most important day of the year 🙂 Today is all about me. Yeah right lol.

Wife tottled off to work and left me with the kids, so of course a sleep in was out of the question. Kidletts woke me with a scrummy tray of cold toast, sickly sweet coffee, wet kisses and a knee to the groin as they crowded into my bed. Follow up was some one-off original masterpieces in crayon and colouring-in pencils, and my oldest selflessly bought me a bottle of his favourite alcohol. Subsequently, I spent the day baking cakes, changing nappies, arranging activities, organizing lunches, watching Barbie & Disney movies, doing washing and contemplating how lucky I am to have this big, beautiful family.

Our friends are always asking Tracey and I how we manage on such a tight budget with so many of us. And they marvel that our kids behave in public and display passable manners without threats or coercion.

Even though we don’t make much money we’ve sent our oldest kids to a private school, we go on holidays a couple of times a year, have just about every must-have gadget – including 5 laptops, LCD tv, automatic coffee maker, Xbox, Wii, Iphone and treadmill – we recently purchased a block of land to build on down the track and managed to give our oldest a car, albeit secondhand, for his eighteenth.

And yet, truth be told, my wife and I are hopeless with money – especially if we go shopping together. So how do we manage? Well it’s all about having a plan. Our plan might not be your plan, but parts of our plan might become a part of yours. The idea is to find the plan that works for you. And a tip to the wise, the best plan is one that doesn’t feel like a plan.

But, as you’ll see, finances are only part of the plan. There’s so much more to raising a large brood of kids than getting food into their mouths. Somehow you’ve also got to find time to make each of them feel special.

My wife and I have been talking about starting a blog showcasing how we manage and today, sitting in the lounge room with kids chattering all around me, with everyone offering to fetch me an apple or biscuit, I felt inspired to get it up and running.

 Our ’BIG FAMILY little income’ Facebook Page

’raising a family on little more than laughs’
Big Family

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