"Do they ALL belong to you???"

This is the most asked question I get.  Maybe not daily, but atleast a few times every week.  It usually occurs at a grocery store where I have decided to bring all four of the kiddos with me to get some necessities.  It usually starts off with a stare, first to me, then to my oldest daughter (9), then a scan over the others and lay to rest at my one-year-old little man...and then back at me, with a look of pure confusion.  I have learned to laugh, out loud.  I look at them and give them an opportunity to ask.  Several people have given me a look of dissappointment and a shake of the head.  Seriously! It happens.  I know exactly what they are thinking, "Ever heard of BIRTH CONTROL?".  Haha.  I know we are different. I know we don't look "normal".  I know we didn't stop at 2.3.  I know I'm young, but no, I'm not still in high school and yes I have a college degree.  But who cares if I was, who cares if I went to college?  I'm a good mom.  And to me, that is what I want to matter.  Yet my family is judged every day by the fact that we are different.  If they only knew....

TJ and I were married on August 17, 2005.  It was a Wednesday.  It was raining.  It was perfect.  6 months later we were prego with my first born, Kyrsta Grace.  She really is our most precious creation.  She may be a middle child now, but she will forever be our first born.  1 year and a few months later we got a surprise when we found out I was pregnant again.  We were in the middle of moving (once more) from Utah back to Washington for TJ's new job.  We were scared.  We didn't have a home!  So we moved in the basement of my best friends house.  The catch here is that they are foster parents.  And at this time they had 6 children living with them.  So add our family of three and you have 11 people under one roof.  It was fun. =) 
During this time, we grew to know two of the children our friends had living with them.  At this time they were 7 and 5.  They were a handful (well, at least that 5 year old boy sure was!).  We got ourselves a place to live, moved out, and spent the next few months doing our own little family thing.  And then the day came that we found out these two kiddos weren't going to be able to go home to their birth parents, and needed to be adopted.... But I was pregnant!  TJ was working nights.  And um, our little life was comfortable.  Why change that?
We prayed, we talked, and we did.  We decided that we may not have much, but we do have love.  We have a mommy and a daddy.  We have a family.  They had nothing.  Alexis and Tayvin came to live with us 1 month before I delivered our baby boy, Asher J.  And then, about 9 months later we finalized our adoptions of Tayv and Lex, and became The Ewen 6.  I'm still only 26.  TJ is still working nights.  My kids are still a handful at times.  But we are a family.  And we love each other deeply.  So when you see a young mom like me in the grocery store, stare all you want, but think about why they may be different.  It's not always because they don't know about birth control.  It might not be the result of irresponsibility.  It may simply be a an attempt at trying to love.