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One little, two little, three little Indians,
Four little, five little, six little ....
No, no, no, not Indians.
Wheelers. Four little, five little, six little Wheelers.
Seven little, eight little, nine little Wheelers,
Ten little Wheelers all.
And the ages of those 10 little Wheelers stretch from years down to months, but they’re not exactly stair steps.
They’re just brothers and sisters, just all in the family.
A special family, all different but all alike, large, small, girls, boys, white, Hispanic and white, black and white — and full of talent.
Ben, 23, is a businessman; Tom, 21, an adventurer; Meghan, 20, feels like a second mother; Chelsea, 14, and Mike, 12, musicians; Zack, 6, an athlete; Nick, 5, an artist and a gymnast; Mica and Katie, 312-year-old twins who aren’t twins, but are good snugglers; and Isabelle is a first class kisser.
“Gimme kisses,” she says, and who can resist?
And everybody, says Meghan, the “second mother,” makes good grades.
Not that Jim, son of Jane McNeely Wheeler of Mooresville, and his wife, Susan, planned to have 10 children.
Why, that meant two vehicles — a van and a suburban — to get from East Lansing, Mich., to Jim’s family’s big traditional Thanksgiving gathering at the Asa and Miriam McNeely farm on Highway 150 on Thursday.
And three motel rooms.
But vehicles and rooms are things.
Ten children is a decision and a commitment and a family.
Jim’s mother, Jane McNeely Wheeler, grew up here and returned after years in New York to be near family. So he feels at home.
“As long as I can remember I’ve been coming down here,” he says. His aunt and uncle moved to the farm in 1955, “so I was there very early on. My mother and younger sister and I used to come down by train. We’d get a sleeper car and eat on the train and sleep in those little fold-out beds ... ”
And they often visit his wife Sue’s family, where she’s among the youngest of 10.
And he loves it.
“And now she’s the mother of 10. What goes around comes around. Be careful what you wish for. Last year we had her family at our house for Thanksgiving, and there must have been 55 or so.”
So maybe their houseful was meant to be.
Sue went from registered nurse to a master’s degree in pediatric nursing and then a doctorate in family and child ecology, which is a holistic approach to children and families and how they function. She taught public health at Michigan State University for 18 years until she became involved with the nursing program for the Lansing school district a year ago.
Jim is general manager of Alro Steel’s “big house” distribution center, which supplies metals to customers all over the country.
Married in 1984, Jim says, “we had an ‘ours-mine-yours’ relationship. I have two children from a previous marriage — Ben and Tom. Sue had Meghan from a first marriage. Then we had Chelsea in 1986 and thought we were through.
“Then we decided maybe there were some kids out there who needed a home and maybe we wanted a little larger family, so we started exploring the whole adoption arena.
“Sometimes it feels like a calling,” he says. Being parents is “something we seem to do pretty well by all external accounts. We seem to be well received in school. We have the tolerance and the patience and the energy. So ... ”
“We went to Catholic Social Services,” Jim says. “We didn’t want to get into the foster parent role. We were afraid we would become too attached and would have a problem sending a child back into a situation we weren’t comfortable with.”
But adoption isn’t quick or easy.
“They ask some very pointed questions,” he says. What kind of child would they consider — age, race, sex, prenatal drug exposure, handicaps?
“You have to do some self examination. Are you up to the task? We said we were open to interracial children. Mild drug exposure wouldn’t bother us.”
But they wanted children four and under because of the ages of the children they had.
“I don’t recall a lot of consternation,” he says. “We could have had another child, but we had already done that part of parenting. So why not? Maybe there’s a certain sense of social conscience or just the fact that there were kids out there” who needed a family.
Chelsea was 6 when they chose Michael, who was 4 then.
“He’d been through the foster system,” Jim says. He was taken from his parents because of abuse and neglect. Zack was about 11 months old when he came the next year.
Then they broke their own rule and became licensed foster parents so they could get Zack’s half-brother, Nick, before he was freed for adoption. And they worried that something would go wrong. It didn’t. He’s theirs.
“The sexes were skewed. There were only two girls among seven.
“But we left that up to God. What happens, happens.”
And then Sue’s work led them to a badly abused 8-month-old who came into the hospital where she was teaching. Catholic Services wanted a foster home, assuming relatives would step forward.
“We thought it would be a long weekend, but no one stepped forward,” and at eight months she became their Kathryn Elizabeth, who calls herself Katie Kathryn Elizabeth.
Within months the agency called again.
Would they take another foster child, just for a short time? She was half-sister to Zack and Nick and also neglected by her parents. Two months later, she returned home.
“That was a heart-breaker for us,” Jim says, “an awful thing. But in September she was abandoned again” and became their Mica Morgan Elizabeth.
“And before she was legally ours,” Jim says, they called. Another half-sister. Same mother, different fathers. And because of the previous removals, Isabelle Jane, was removed at the hospital two days after her birth.
“She’s now 18 months old. The kids call her Izzy or Busy Izzy.”
Five are six and under. They represent three different races.
But Jim doesn’t notice public reaction to the racial differences.
“My wife says people stare and make rude comments. I’m 6-6 and 250 pounds, and they generally don’t bother me much. But my hair is gray, and they say, ‘Oh, are these your grandchildren?’ ”
They run into class assignments when children are asked to bring in their family history.
“We just deal with those issues one at a time,” he says, “and we moved to East Lansing, the university city, where we find a much greater degree of diversity and tolerance. We blend in, but we’re always unusual because of the sheer numbers.”
Which means they stay busy. Nothing is really easy.
“But you make certain choices. Obviously we don’t go out to the movies like we used to. But the bigger kids help the little ones. Everyone pitches in.
“And with this many kids, there has to be a dog. Our primary dog is huge — Ted, a Great Pyrenees, like a blond Newfoundland. He weighs about 135.
“Our back-up dog is Barney, a mutt. Just a little black dog. I don’t know who he looks like.
“And we have a cat, Gonzo. Just a cat. Sue and Mike were at the shelter so Mike could get a kitten, but he decided they ought to take Gonzo because nobody else would.”
Nobody knows where he found the name Gonzo.
But everybody knows mornings are the hard times and laundry never ends. He and Sue do most of the cooking and have a lot of chicken and macaroni and cheese. Meghan, that second mother, arranges her college classes in the afternoons and takes care of the children in the mornings. A friend reverses that schedule to cover afternoons. And Sue works in the schools now so she can follow the children’s schedule.
“But I don’t see how she does all she does,” Jim says.
Rules? Not many.
Be nice to each other. Care about each other. No hockey in the living room. Take off your shoes when you come in.
They’ve got five bedrooms, a table that seats everyone and a pool that gets a lot of use in the summer time.
The nicest part of a family that big are the little moments, when one crawls up in your lap and snuggles down. Like Katie Kathryn, who’s a daddy’s girl, did at the farm.
“I had a wonderful resert,” she said.
“A what?” he asked her.
“A wonderful resert from the resert table.”
And he’ll remember walking in the woods with Isabelle where he remembers hunting squirrels when he was little.
Will they have any more children?
Jim is 50; Sue, 44.
“I don’t know,” he says. “We aren’t actively seeking. I tried to get a judicial tubal ligation but it didn’t take. They know our phone number.”
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