Sunday, February 1, 2009

yours, mine, and ours

kind of a brady bunch on steroids, yours, mine, and ours marries lucille ball to henry fonda. she has 8 kids, he has 10. hilarity ensues. you get the picture.as you can imagine, the food needed to feed this army is going to be pricey. breakfast preparations include 5 pounds of bacon and 3 dozen eggs. on a trip to the commissary (luckily dad is in the navy), 3 carts of food, including double digit quarts of milk, totals $126. god bless 1968.

which got me to thinking about a couple things.

1) inflation and the rising cost of food. it's scary. i'm not an economist or a financier and i have anxiety.

2) will we ever see big families like this again (>6 kids), since it is so expensive? why did people stop having so many kids - dual career parents, cost, no need for workers in the family business? one thing's for sure, if everyone started having 6 kids again, the restaurant business would go to hell cause no one could afford it.
thoughts?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think one of the reasons people stopped having so many kids was the shift away from agriculture. On a farm a bunch of kids would be a bunch of potential farm hands, potentially producing more food than they would consume as the number grew.

Anyway, enough serious stuff. :) Here's a blog post I did a while back analyzing a food related detail in a poster for the 2006 remake of Yours, Mine and Ours:

http://celsor.com/2006/01/07/yours-mine-and-ours-pig-loves-pepperoni-pizza/

Sean Eddington said...

I will say this....I have 7 kids. We aren't necessarily done either. Although I recognize that I am a statistical outlyer in this instance, I do want to say that we are not as rare as you might think. I have numerous friends from church who have 6+ kids. Their is a family with 14 kids, one with 8 boys and 1 girl, one with 11 kids, and I can think of several with 7 or 8 kids. These are all families with natural born children. I can think of a couple of families with more than 6 including adopted children. Also I went to school with the Krahlman's there were 14 kids in that family.

I think there IS however a societal push against large families. Many people think that the size of my family is an open invitation for them to make rude comments or extremely personal inquiries. "Don't you think you have had enough?" and "You know, if you want, I can show you where they sell condoms here." And, those were both perfect strangers.

k said...

mark- i said this on your blog, but your post is way hilarious.

sean- wow! congratulations! big families are awesome. i always wished i had more siblings when i was growing up. i am surprised you know so many people with large families, though. my mom and i were talking about it when i did the original post, and she said it seemed when she was growing up 6 kids was the norm, whereas when i was young it was more like 2-3. only a couple of my friends came from large families, and the biggest one was 6.

as for random strangers feeling the need to comment, they should keep their rudeness to themselves.