Nine Kids, Two Vans, and a Very Excited Dog
The house at number seventeen Maple Crescent had never, in its forty-year history, contained quite so much noise at 6:45 in the morning.
Mom stood in the upstairs hallway with a clipboard pressed against her chest like a shield, curls springing loose from a bun that had given up the fight sometime around dawn. She had drawn up the checklist the night before in careful, color-coded ink: nine names, nine columns, boxes for toothbrush, swimsuit, passport, shoes. It had seemed, at eleven o'clock the previous evening, like a perfectly reasonable system. Now, watching Sarah sprint past in one sock with her hair full of static electricity, she wondered if she ought to have made it laminated. Or bulletproof.
"Socks!" she called down the hall. "Matching ones, please, we are not doing the rainbow-foot thing again, Sarah, I mean it!"
"They match in spirit!" Sarah hollered back, already three doors away.
Below, the kitchen had become a staging ground for chaos of an entirely different flavor. Suitcases lay open on every available surface like sleeping giants with their bellies split wide, spilling swimsuits and flip-flops and, in Aimee's case, an alarming quantity of stuffed animals that…