06 DC bench seat conversion & carpet

You 7 and your buddy 12!?! What's in the water where you live

 

We only have 1. More than 2-3 is insane.

 

He's referring to me. After number 3, they all just blend together.

 

This is what I often hear! But after seeing the operations of a 5-child household with my SBIL, and listening to Mom, whose obdient Polish-Catholic parents kept churning out until grandma's uterus finally called it quits, landing them with 7 kids who made it, 1 who didn't, and 1 half-sister they didn't learn about until grandma's 90-something b-day, I have a hard time believing your words are anything more than a coping mechanism

Props for the fertility, though!

 

Ah I miss saw who I was replying to. @TheBlackMomba is who I was talking about.

 

Yea, we didn't really notice a huge change from 2 to 3 and I feel like our 4th will just blend. But dang I'd hate to have your grocery bill. Living on a farm with a big garden and deer hunting saves no telling how much money us already.

 

I would imagine with 7 and 12 kids (dear lord) that you gotta change the strategy for food up big time. Easy to cook for 2, or even a family of 4, but 12??? Time to go into cafeteria mode. Deep freeze for bulk food purchasing, large pantry for bulk dry goods. Oldest kids gotta get in the game and help with food prep and cooking / distributing meals to younger kids. Living on a farm is the only context I see that having a bunch of help, er I mean kids makes sense.

 

That's when you just buying the huge sleeves of ground beef, lots of elbow macaroni, and buying Hambuger Helper's buoillon powder, and guess what every meal is some variation of?

Hamburger helper
Chili
Chili-mac

 

We have a refrigerator in the kitchen, one in the garage and a stand up deep freeze in the garage. We shop once a week with coupons and go early enough to buy the meat that is marked down that day.

That's about it. Hamburger assistant, chicken assistant...

 

I later found out after his departure why, one of the guys on my lighting crew earlier in life who had 10 mouths to feed at home, would always ask to do the back-end meat & freezer section of the grocery chains we'd get booked to re-lamp. Nobody ever wanted to do those sections, this guy was practically begging for it, at least 2-3 nights per week. It sucked, it was cold.

Re-lamp consisted of, primarily, us going store to store all over the SE USA, pulling out every lightbulb in the store, repairing/replacing/retrofitting fixtures. You pretty much loaded up rolling scaffolds with flourescent bulb boxes, one guy on a platform 10-20ft up in the air, and swapped bulbs. It wasn't fun work, but it paid the bills and you lived on the road all-week, got a solid food stipend, and decent hotels paid for, good overtime (20-40hrs/week of 1.5x)

Anyway, his cousin was on my team and explained it after the guy was long gone, moved back to PR. Dude would roll into the meat section with empty boxes for the 8ft bulb sleeves we used - the boxes were probably 10"x10"x96", and he would grab 2-4 of those jumbo 20-30lb sleeves of ground meat, shove it into one of those boxes, and roll right on out of the store to throw the 'empties'/'spent' bulbs in the travel trailer for disposal.

Then it clicked. THAT is why dude is able to throw BBQ at his house all the time, also.

Never took anything else. Never chicken, slabs of pork/lamb/beef, only the cheap tubemeat. Although I heard he was known to fill the 4ft T40 boxes with a few sleeves of Milwaukee's Beast. Which was all they ever drank at the hotel.

 

It’s impressive watching dinner come together over there. The wife and I went to his second oldest birthday party last January. I’ve never seen such a big cast iron skillet in my life. They were frying 40 pounds of chicken, Had 8 boxes of eggo waffles for chicken and waffles.

As you can imagine everything is done in large scale. His annual crawfish boil party has 100 pounds of crawfish alone. They don’t eat cheap for sure.