There were three families on my block growing up with 12 + kids.

Serious?? I knew one family (at my Catholic church) with 16, but that was over like, 23 years, not over 16. And might've involved two wives, I'm not sure. But otherwise, the families of like, six kids, were the big families.

The new baby is Johannah. Which is too similar to Joy-Anna for a sibling name, IMO, but it's not like I'll ever have to name 16 kids.

I have no room to ridicule, both my parents were one of 12. People always asked me if we were Catholic. I always said, "No. Hillbillies." Which is basically true.

Oh, I can name a half dozen families like that, easily. Maybe it was a Milwaukee thing.

I mis-skimmed. Okay, it's actually better that the 16th one has a J-name, too.

Woah. And people act surprised when they find out I'm one of four.

Did anyone else catch that the father's name is Jim? I wonder if they did rock-paper-scissors to figure out whose first letter the kids would get.

My great-great-grandfather fathered 17 children with three wives in succession. He moved from South Carolina to Alabama around 1845 with wife #1. She died; he married my great-great-grandmother. She died, sometime in the late 1850's, IIRC. He then married wife #3, fathered his last few children, and circa 1863 decided it'd be a great lark to go be a soldier despite the fact he was at least in his mid-40's by then, and had the 17 kids. So he runs off and joins the army, leaving my step-great-great with the menagerie, though I'm assuming the oldest were grown and on their own by then.

She divorced him.

Good for her.

I used to work with a girl who had more than a hundred first cousins. Seriously. It's a thing.

This conversation somehow reminded me of a youthful exercise in pedantry.

My junior year in high school, our school play was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The brothers were named Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon, and it scares me that I remember that. I don't remember my own character's name, just that I was Ephraim's bride.

Anyway, the heroine of the play, upon marrying Adam spur-of-the-moment, going home with him, and discovering she's to keep house for not one but seven men, comments upon their fine-sounding Bible names, except that she doesn't remember a Frank in the Bible. A brother responds, "Tweren't no F names in the Bible, so Ma named him Frankincense 'cuz he smelled so sweet."

(WHY do I remember lines from a play I was in in 1988? This is scary.)

Pedant that I am, something struck me as Not Quite Right, so I went home and got out my parents' Bible concordance and confirmed that there were, at the least, a Felix and a Festus to be found in the Bible.

Remarking upon this to my drama classmates did not improve my popularity and coolness.

I know Jinger. But it it J as in jump, and inger as in ... ing(the verb tense)-er. She's chinese.

-t, my heartfelt sympathies. My wish is you only get happy surprises and find your feet firm on the ground.