Adore You | Twilight [2]

Prologue

Twelve is our number.

It's the number of games my husband Tom coaches at Lincoln College every season.

It's the number of times we zero out our bank account each year to make ends meet.

And it's the number of kids we try to keep track of. Twelve's 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 at 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 eight kids, I wanted eight kids. Bam. An hour after I met him, I knew he was the one. We just had family at the wedding.

Oh, and Shake Maguire, Tom's best man.

What a hot dog.

A year later, we had our first- Nora. I loved taking her to work with me. After Charlie and Lorraine were born, we realized our dream of living in the city and having eight kids and two careers wasn't gonna work.

As much as we wanted our big careers, we wanted our big family more. So Tom settled for a Division llI coaching job at Lincoln... I quit writing for the Tribune, and we moved to the country.

Tom and I got busy when we moved to Midland. We had Henry, Sarah,Jake and Mark in consecutive years. Then we went for magic number eight, and instead...
We got the first set of fraternal twins - Jessica and Kim.

With each child, Tom and I got further 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 the athletic director at our alma mater. And, well, too many beers and nine months later, 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 12.

But by then, Tom and I were experts at managing chaos.