People ask how many children you have.  They do it all the time.  Its kind of a small talk subject, like the weather, really.  When you say, "seven."  ((or five, or nine or fourteen for that matter) the reaction is almost always the same.  What!?  Seven!?  Woah!  Seriously?!  How do you do that?! 

Deep down, what they all really want to ask is, "Don't you use birth control?"  "Or do you just like babies?"  Like not using birth control and liking babies were somehow incompatible, mutually exclusive thoughts.

The answer, of course, isn't an either/or.  No, we don't use birth control.  Yes, we like babies.  So I recently had this idea.  When people respond that way, I am just going to satisfy their curiosity immediately and say, "Well, we don't use birth control."

People talk quite flippantly on the bus and in the hairdresser and everywhere about their fertility or lack thereof, or how they got rid of it, postponed it, ectomied it, or had it chemically rendered useless.  Perhaps we should be a little more blunt with the general populace that we don't do anything about it.  We just have babies. 

There are a pile of kind, deep, snarky answers out in the world to people who ask about large families.  You probably have heard most of them, but I have never actually heard someone just say that they don't use birth control.  So I think I will start.

I might also start wearing a t-shirt that says:

Just doing our part 

to prevent the inbreeding 

of the human race.