The Flanders family shares lessons in life, faith, and love.
Having a large family seems an impossible vocation for many people. Jennifer and Doug Flanders are a hopeful example of an active family with 12 children. In addition to Doug’s work as a physician, the couple homeschools their children, write and publishes books, as well as writing for several blogs providing faith-filled household, marriage, and parenting tips.
The Flanders’ credit their ability to manage a busy household, educate their children, and provide so many valuable resources to others to their Christian faith. They view their children, and each other, as a blessing renewed daily by God. That is what made their “happily ever after” story so appealing to us at Goedeker’s.
We are greatly honored that Jennifer took some time to answer a few of our questions about life, productivity, and having a large family.
Goedeker’s: You are obviously very busy – 12 children, books, career, publishing company, several blogs – what’s the best way for people to keep up on what you are doing next?
Jennifer Flanders: I’m a slightly sporadic blogger, as my responsibilities as wife and mother trump my aspirations as a writer, but if anybody is interested in reading what I have to say when I have time to say it, they may subscribe to either (or both) my personal blog at http://lovinglifeathome.com or our family website at http://www.flandersfamily.info The blog deals primarily with the topics of love, sex, marriage and Christian living, while the family site has lots of parenting pointers, homeschool help, free printables, organization ideas, and money-saving strategies. My husband, who works very hard to provide for this big crew, blogs even less frequently than I do. You can read some of his thoughts at http://alltruthisgodstruth.com. We also have a couple of Facebook pages that correspond to the blogs: you can follow us at https://www.facebook.com/love.your.husband.yourself and/or https://www.facebook.com/TheFlandersFamily.
Goedeker’s: What are some of your best time management pointers?
Jennifer Flanders: Give up even trying to do it all. Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Focus instead on doing the most important things — those things that define your highest priorities and dearest values — and doing them consistently and well. For some practical suggestions for boosting your productivity in the areas that matter most to you, see this post.
Goedeker’s: How do you do it all?
Jennifer Flanders: Well, as I intimated above, I don’t “do it all”; however, by the grace of God, I do manage to accomplish quite a bit. I credit this to the fact that (1) I pray daily that God would multiply my strength and energy in the same way He multiplied the loaves and fishes, (2) I don’t watch TV, and (3) as long as I feel rested, I get up just as soon as I wake up. Twenty-five years of being awoken at all hours of the night to tend to nursing babies has taught me that I don’t need nearly as much sleep as I used to get before motherhood. Even though my last baby weaned a couple years ago, I still wake up for four o’clock feedings, but now I normally use that time to write.
Goedeker’s: How did this Flanders family get started? How did you meet, propose, etc?
Jennifer Flanders: We met on the campus of Dallas Baptist University just a few weeks before I graduated. Doug had actually tried to introduce himself twice before, but didn’t succeed in striking up an extended conversation until his third attempt. The date was April 23, 1987, just a day after he turned nineteen and two days after I turned twenty-one. We talked for about three hours and have been virtually inseparable ever since. You can read our whole story in fastidious detail — along with photographs to document almost every event — on our family website.
Goedeker’s: What is your favorite family activity?
Reading is a favorite pastime of the Flanders family.
Jennifer Flanders: We love to read, both individually and as a group, so we always keep several books going. I read aloud to the children daily after lunch, usually a bit of poetry followed by some biography or “living” history that coordinates with their school subjects , then Doug reads to the family again in the evening after dinner, first a passage from the Bible and then a little fiction. Benjamin (our oldest child still at home) usually reads to his siblings for another hour or so before bed. (That’s starting to sound like the line out of Princess Bride, isn’t it? “When I was a kid, television was called books.”) In addition to lots of stand-alone classics, we’ve shared lots of great series together with our children: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Little Britches books, Artemis Fowl, The Hunger Games, plus everything ever written by Lloyd Alexander.
We also enjoy staying physically active. Doug and our older kids have competed in triathlons off and on for years, and he even talked me into running a full marathon with him a few months after I delivered our eighth baby. (Actually, I probably shouldn’t call what we were doing running — it was really more of a twenty-mile jog followed by a six-mile cool down, but we still managed to cross the finish line hand-in-hand before they stopped the clock!)
Our family loves to travel, too. We’ve driven all across the US together, and after saving up enough frequent flyer miles to get ten free tickets to London, we once spent three weeks backpacking Europe. We toured nine countries and seventeen cities in twenty-one days, sleeping on trains and in guesthouses or youth hostels. It was an incredible adventure. Even our youngest wore a backpack. It was only big enough to hold three diapers and some travel-sized wet wipes, but he proudly toted it everywhere we went.
Goedeker’s: Few families today have many children. What advice do you have for a new family starting out that might be considering having many children?
Jennifer Flanders: Babies have a way of turning your world upside-down (and I mean that in the best possible way). Once a little one enters the picture, you have to revamp your routines, rethink where you store your cleaning supplies, become very intentional about scheduling alone time with your spouse, etc.
But truth be told, it’s the first baby that requires the biggest adjustment. Adding more children to the equation after that normally just necessitates some minor tweaking to what you’re already doing, rather than a major overhaul. If you have your babies fairly close together, it may get a little harder before it gets easier — I think having four was probably the hardest number for us — but after that, your first children will be old enough to be a real help to you, and you’ll have somebody around to keep an eye on the baby long enough for you to take a shower. Ha!
I sometimes meet moms who say they’d love to have a big family, but they are so overwhelmed with the two toddlers they have at home that don’t think they could handle having twelve. My reaction? “Of course you’re overwhelmed! Toddlers are hard. They sap the energy right out of you. But kids don’t stay two forever. And if you do end up having a bunch of them, they won’t all be two at the same time.”
Of course, invariably, that’s what those moms are picturing when they imagine life at my house: Me taking care of houseful of two-year-olds, doing essentially the same thing they are doing, times six. That’s not really accurate… in fact, that same mental image exhausts me just thinking about it!
Whether you have two or twelve or twenty children, parenting is one of the most challenging jobs you will ever do, but it is also one of the most rewarding. I love having a big family. There is never a dull moment with so many different personalities and gifts and character qualities all living under the same roof. And I love the fact that I get to watch and enjoy each new stage in my children’s development without having to give up the old one. I get to cuddle with my babies, have “grown up” conversations with my adult children, and everything in between. It’s terrific!
You can follow Jennifer and Doug’s writings on their blog, FlandersFamily.info from there, you can find links to their many other writings.
