39 kids and counting?

[Cheesemaker]

http:// thebodiebunch.blogspot.com

 

She's 57 and single. And says she has 39 kids.

 

I'm in awe.

[ilovetchotchkes]

I bet she's a foster mom. She talks about "sibling groups". :)

[Conuly]

I'm not certain one woman could give birth to that many children, even if you assume lots of multiples. One man could have 39 kids, easily. Heck, if he tries hard enough he could manage it in a single calendar year! But one woman? Dubious.

I, too, think at least some of them have to be foster kids or the like. (I doubt anybody would let somebody adopt until they had 39 children.)

[Didi]

I am trying to figure it out - it looks like she started out as a foster mom?

She has a link to a lady Amanda Smotherman (as far as I can tell that is the name) who has 21 kids, or at least did 4 years ago, she keeps moving blogs so she can host more pictures, but I can't find a recent one...

[valsa]

I used to sometimes read her blog. IIRC, she's got one bio kid and all the rest are adopted (mostly large sibling groups and other hard to place situations) She's had some really rough times (kids with reactive attachment disorder who had to be sent to residential facilities and she has a restraining order against at least one kid who she was afraid would try to kill her)

[Cheesemaker]

That's what I've seen too, that they seem to be foster to adopt sibling groups. And yes, she's had a rough time. But, she does actually seek therapy and help for herself and her kids, unlike other quiverfull types. She seems Christian, but not Fundie. But the sheer logistics of that many kids make me pale.

[Cheesemaker]

I'm not certain one woman could give birth to that many children, even if you assume lots of multiples. One man could have 39 kids, easily. Heck, if he tries hard enough he could manage it in a single calendar year! But one woman? Dubious.

I, too, think at least some of them have to be foster kids or the like. (I doubt anybody would let somebody adopt until they had 39 children.)

Not even Octomom!

[lilwriter85]

I doubt they are all her biological children. I agree with Conuly a man could easily have 39 kids and some sperm donors have fathered 70 or more kids.

This blogger has a link to another blogger's family with 21 kids and some of those kids are adopted. There are quite bit of large families in which some or all of the kids are adopted. Several years back TLC did a documentary John and Jeanette Murphy they have biological children and 18 living adopted children and two deceased adopted children. Several of the adopted children all have special needs such Down syndrome, FAS, and few other disabilities. Also in California there the Silcock family in which all of the sons are adopted and I believe there are 30 boys and the older ones are in their late 20's to early 30s.

[snickerz]

I've read there a few times. I think she was married before and is now divorced. They're adopted from foster care. Many, many rough situations. Kids with RAD, drug affected, severe abuse, etc. She started out idealistic, thinking she could "fix" these kids with love. Obviously, she bit off more than she could chew. Over the years, she's been beaten down by the realities of these kids' situations, and has come to realize that some/many of these kids just can't be fixed - no amount of love or therapy can take away the demons of their early lives. She's said that she won't adopt/foster any more, she's just raising the ones she's got already.

[Cheesemaker]

Wow, it took 39 kids to get to that point. I wonder of those kids, how many will end up with long term issues and how many will end up "normal". It does seem that she is doing a pretty good job with them, at least from the way she talks about helping with school, therapy, encouraging art projects, taking the steps to remove dangerous kids from the home, etc.

[Didi]

She also linked to a family with 10 kids (not to bad in fundydom, right?), but the SUPER sad part of that one is the link takes you to a 2009 blog entry basically saying "Cindy died peacefully in her sleep." Cindy was the mom, and the baby in the pic couldn't be older than 1. I have been trying to find out if the dad remarried or what, but I can't find anymore.

And the family with 21 I wonder if they have more now because the link she has on there is like 4 years old and the most recent blog I can find is still 2 years old.

[MollySee]

A friend of mine adopted a little boy from Eastern Europe who turned out to have serious issues (and this woman already has two kids with autism, so she knows what she's doing) and he has since been adopted by the Silcock family. I check up on him from time to time via their blog and he seems like he's doing well!

[lilwriter85]

A friend of mine adopted a little boy from Eastern Europe who turned out to have serious issues (and this woman already has two kids with autism, so she knows what she's doing) and he has since been adopted by the Silcock family. I check up on him from time to time via their blog and he seems like he's doing well!

That is good that he is doing well. I've been reading the Silcock blog/site for a few years. I saw them on an adoption documentary on one of the Discovery channels years ago. They are interesting family.

[MollySee]

That is good that he is doing well. I've been reading the Silcock blog/site for a few years. I saw them on an adoption documentary on one of the Discovery channels years ago. They are interesting family.

They do seem interesting. They must have A LOT of support staff. Also, I find the acting thing a tad bit odd, but hopefully all the kids are happy and healthy...

[lilwriter85]

They do seem interesting. They must have A LOT of support staff. Also, I find the acting thing a tad bit odd, but hopefully all the kids are happy and healthy...

They do have several people working for them. I also find the acting thing odd, but it seems only some of the boys act. Hunter acted in a few episode of Boston Public.

[MollySee]

They do have several people working for them. I also find the acting thing odd, but it seems only some of the boys act. Hunter acted in a few episode of Boston Public.

I just checked out Discovery on demand hoping they'd have the doc... no dice :-(

[Mais Pourquoi]

I'm not certain one woman could give birth to that many children, even if you assume lots of multiples. One man could have 39 kids, easily. Heck, if he tries hard enough he could manage it in a single calendar year! But one woman? Dubious.

The record for number of children born to one woman is 69. Many of them were multiples and they were all born in the 1700s. I can't imagine birthing one child without any modern knowledge, let alone a ridiculous amount of multiples.

[Conuly]

The record for number of children born to one woman is 69. Many of them were multiples and they were all born in the 1700s. I can't imagine birthing one child without any modern knowledge, let alone a ridiculous amount of multiples.

Did they... survive?

[Rowan]

Did they... survive?

67 of them survived to adulthood! She had four sets of quads. Insane.

http://www3.telus.net/tyee/multiples/multiple.html

#23

[Conuly]

My goodness. That certainly is remarkable!

[lilwriter85]

I just checked out Discovery on demand hoping they'd have the doc... no dice :-(

The documentary was apart of a series called Adoption Stories. Most of the documentary focused on the adoption of Barry. Barry was their foster son for several years but his biological didn't sign their rights away so when Barry turned 18, he asked to be formally adopted by Jim and Ann. Barry died about a year or two after the documentary was made. The Silcock family was also on Nanny 911 a couple of years after that.

[godlytomatosoup]

Oh, Cindy Bodie! i like her blog. I've been reading her for a while. Public school, not homeschool, and she's never said anything about being against birth control. Her eldest is her biological child, after that she got divorced and started adopting - mainly from the foster system, but a few international children in there. She made a point of adopting them in sibling groups so as not to break up families. Also a lot of her youngest children are the biological children of some of her adoptive children who are now adults.

She didn't have 39 children all at once, this has been going on over about twenty years. Out of those 39, there was one disruption (that's adoption speak for giving the kid back) to protect the other kids from sexual abuse, two other kids who are permanently in residential treatment programs because they were so violent that she and her other kids were in serious danger (she still visits them regularly, attends court hearings, takes them birthday presents and out to dinner, etc.) And of the rest, about a quarter do indeed have a lot of mental problems and/or are in and out of prison. Another quarter are doing really well, and the rest are in the middle.

I really do wonder about some of her kids with the extreme attachment disorders, and whether they would have done better in a smaller family, but in a lot of her children's cases, the ideal family just wasn't available for them.

[MollySee]

Oh, Cindy Bodie! i like her blog. I've been reading her for a while. Public school, not homeschool, and she's never said anything about being against birth control. Her eldest is her biological child, after that she got divorced and started adopting - mainly from the foster system, but a few international children in there. She made a point of adopting them in sibling groups so as not to break up families. Also a lot of her youngest children are the biological children of some of her adoptive children who are now adults.

She didn't have 39 children all at once, this has been going on over about twenty years. Out of those 39, there was one disruption (that's adoption speak for giving the kid back) to protect the other kids from sexual abuse, two other kids who are permanently in residential treatment programs because they were so violent that she and her other kids were in serious danger (she still visits them regularly, attends court hearings, takes them birthday presents and out to dinner, etc.) And of the rest, about a quarter do indeed have a lot of mental problems and/or are in and out of prison. Another quarter are doing really well, and the rest are in the middle.

I really do wonder about some of her kids with the extreme attachment disorders, and whether they would have done better in a smaller family, but in a lot of her children's cases, the ideal family just wasn't available for them.

Yeah, often times the larger families are the only ones who are equipped or willing to take a child with serious attachment issues. It's really hard, because how do you blame a child for having issues when they never had a stable foundation? and on the other hand, it's dangerous to your other children.. so you have to think of that. It's just sad really, that these kids have to basically rewire themselves because adults screwed them up the first time..

[Elle]

I'm not certain one woman could give birth to that many children, even if you assume lots of multiples. One man could have 39 kids, easily. Heck, if he tries hard enough he could manage it in a single calendar year! But one woman? Dubious.

The most prolific mother on record is Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev. She had 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. In all, she birthed 69 kids. However, due to that being before the time of DNA testing, some skeptics say no way. There are families TODAY who've birthed only multiple sets of multiples, but we've also got contraception so they don't have to keep giving birth. When I was 20, there was a news story about a girl who had 2 sets of triplets before the age of 18, and her first set of twins at 19. She had as many kids as my mom's mom had, but at a year younger than I was.

Edit: oops, I managed to not see this on the first page. I usually open several topics at once, and if posts are made between when I open them and post my own reply, sometimes this happens.

[luxfilia]

On February 21, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Didi said:

I am trying to figure it out - it looks like she started out as a foster mom?

 

She has a link to a lady Amanda Smotherman (as far as I can tell that is the name) who has 21 kids, or at least did 4 years ago, she keeps moving blogs so she can host more pictures, but I can't find a recent one...

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I was recently thinking about the Smotherman family, who I went to (church) summer camp with. I wondered if they had ever been mentioned here. It was such a weird situation.