Please, Santa… I’d like 13 kids for Christmas
This Christmas Terri Hawthorne will be celebrating with her husband and their THIRTEEN children…
My husband, Mike, and I couldn’t wait to start a family. We’d always wanted lots of kids, and we longed to be a mum and dad. We’d met when I was 17, at high school and became sweethearts, before marrying in 1983. We started trying for a family straight away.
It was almost two years later that I gave birth to our first baby, Ryan, now 34, and he was followed by three more kids, Blake, 30, Jordan 27, and Micah, 22. We were thrown into the chaos of family life – filling school bags, bedtime stories, ferrying the children around – without a moment to breathe.
But I adored every moment of looking after my brood – tears, tantrums and all!
Once they’d grown up, all but Micah had moved out. Mike and I felt like there was something missing. We’d done the parent thing, but we still had so much love to give.
We owned a nursery and, for over 20 years, we’d had foster children there that always wanted to come home with me… And it got me thinking… perhaps we could do that?
Lots of kids needed a stable home and someone to love them. So, I spoke to Mike about it, and we decided to become foster parents in 2012. We opened our home to more than 80 children in six years but, come 2015, we wanted to do more. That’s when we heard about Korgen, then three months, from a social worker. We completely fell in love with him and when we found out he had a newborn sister, Haizlee, two years later, we decided to adopt them both. It was an absolute joy having them in our lives.
By 2017, we had new additions living with us, too…
At first we’d been told there were three siblings that needed fostering. So we’d agreed to take them in, but it turned out there was four of them, then five… plus two more! We couldn’t bear the thought of splitting the kids up. They’d had a tough start in life… they’d been in foster care for three years – now they faced being ripped apart from their brothers and sisters, unless we took them in. It didn’t bear thinking about…
So, we’d decided to give it a go. We couldn’t let these children down. We had a four-bed house, but we converted the office space into a fifth bedroom to make the kids more comfortable.
I’m not saying there
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned’ I ‘Things that Mike and are have taken for granted, a luxury to these children. love You wonder if you could someone else’s kids like your own… well, believe me, you can!’