3 is the new 12

This morning at the girls' second dance class a mom and her daughter arrived a couple of minutes after class started. They missed the first class last week so she wasn't exactly sure of the set-up.

"Can we watch from inside?" she asked us.
"The teacher asked that parents watch from outside," one mom responded.
"Oh. So you can take off for a while then?"
"Hmmm?"
"I mean, where are the others parents? There are more kids in there than parents out here."
"Three are mine," I clarified.
"Yeah," she chuckled, and then, a few seconds later when she realized I wasn't joining her in finding that funny, "Oh...wait...you really DO have three kids?????"

And in Target today and the grocery store people asked or commented,
"Wow...THREE!"
"Are they ALL yours?"
"Oh, wow, look at all of them!"

I also get these comments at work when the patients see my kids' pictures in my exam rooms. I can understand their surprise because women with professional careers quite often don't have any children at all. So I'll give them that. But in normal everyday life at normal everyday places I don't think of three kids as being anything special, and certainly not anything peculiar.

John likes to explain that we were really planning for two but we got the bonus child thrown in there unexpectedly. That seems to restore our position among the sane for most folks.

Not today but in many past situations when we're out we get some questions: what kind of car, how big is our house, do they eat us out of house and home, how much laundry do I have in a week. And then there are the "looks" we get which are much more frequent than the comments. Friendly, but generally surprised. It's like we're one of those families on TV with 12 children.

I've never met a family like that personally but if I did I think I'd be a bit curious, and that's how people seem to feel about me. And so, somehow, we seem to have achieved a similar level of bizarre.