Tania and Mike with their children: Ben, 22; Stephanie, 21; Caitlin, 15; Harry, 12; Eddie, 10; Sid, 9; Patrick, 7; Oliver, 6; Joseph, 4; Twins Libby and Anna, 3; Isobel, 2 ; Timothy, 15 months

Tania Sullivan lives in Kent with her husband Mike and their 13-strong brood. She explains why they decided to have such a large family and how they cope with day-to-day life…

Was it always the plan to have such a large family?
No. Mike and I got together as teenagers but split up after two years. Soon after, I had two children with an abusive partner and then became a single mother. When Mike and I got back together, we discussed having one more, possibly two, but definitely no more than four. It obviously didn’t turn out that way!

What does an average morning look like in your household?
We work from home and the children are home-educated so we do have quite a routine to our mornings but our flexibility means we can go with the flow. If things don’t go to plan, we don’t need to worry about being late for school runs and commutes.

The youngest children are normally awake by six so we head downstairs and they play while I quickly get myself ready and then clean the downstairs bathroom. Mike prepares the dough for the day’s bread the night before and in the morning I shape it into tins to allow the loaves to rise.

The first load of clothes will be in the dryer and the first load of washing will be in the machine. I’ll also have a quick scan of any emails that may have come in overnight (we work with countries all over the world so there is no set nine-to-five for us).

Breakfast for the children is usually homemade bread, cereal or a huge pan of creamy porridge with cup after cup of warm milk. We go through about 10 to 12 pints of milk for breakfast alone. While the kids eat and get themselves ready, we set about cleaning and tidying the house.

By 9.30am the baby is down for his nap, the house is clean (though not necessarily tidy), another load of washing is on the go and lessons and work begin.

Why did you decide to start home-schooling the children?
Our eldest daughter didn’t get her school of choice and also suffered terrible bullying during the final year of junior school. While looking into options for her we realised that home-ed was one of them.

Now the mornings are spent working from textbooks – maths, English, science, history, geography – leaving afternoons free for individual interests. That might be science and coding, something creative or, for our seven-year-old, cooking.

Travel is also part of their education. There was an eight-week road trip around France and Italy, a month in Veneto and this year we’re going back to Italy to visit local food producers. We also take the ‘middle children’ on city breaks – just two or three of them at a time with one parent.

You plan to live self-sufficiently; can you tell us more about this?
Our house is on the market and we’re in the process of buying somewhere in Ireland with a couple of acres. The plan is to live as self-sufficiently as possible – raising pigs, chickens, goats for milk and growing food. At the moment we make do with eight or nine hens in the garden.

Who cooks the meals and what do you eat?
I cook the majority of the meals but Mike is rapidly catching up. He has learnt to cook amazingly well during the last few years. Often Paddy, our 7-year-old, cooks a meal for the family himself.

My mother is Turkish and my father is Greek, and we have a huge love of Italy so a lot of our meals are Mediterranean-based. Pasta is a firm favourite and we make it ourselves with a machine.

How do you manage bedtime with 10 of your children being under the age of 12?
We’ve always believed in routines for mealtimes and bedtimes. This keeps meltdowns caused by over tiredness or hunger at bay, which is important when you have young children.

The youngest four go to bed at 6pm, the next three at 7pm and the older three at 9pm. The two oldest have moved out. One is at university and the other has her own little flat in Surrey.

How do you get on as a family, are there many arguments?
We certainly do argue but not as much as we could. The children have tiffs – the younger ones mostly, as they’re still learning about things like sharing and cooperation. There can also be a fair bit of teasing going on, which sometimes oversteps the mark but nothing in the way of punch-ups. Generally, we get on.

How much does it cost, annually, to raise such a large family?
We don’t buy things unnecessarily and try to be careful with money – paying for things in cash, not credit – and will be completely mortgage-free when we move. We value travel but never pay for package holidays, which tend to be overpriced. Instead, we go directly to owners whose prices are far more reasonable and we arrange our own transport.

We do a large shop every 10-14 days and spend in the region of £1000 a month in Lidl but eat extremely well. Making our own bread saves around £25 or £30 a week. We stock up on pasta flour and olive oil when we go to Italy to make our pasta. We rarely have fast food and make everything from scratch.

You and Mike run a business offering copywriting and web design set-up, plus you’re studying for a BA – how do you find the time for this?
When we have a deadline coming up, or a spate of jobs come in, Mike will take the ‘family’ baton while I hit the keyboard. Work is constant from when we wake to when we go to sleep. Sometimes I go to the local coffee shop for a few hours to get some things done in peace – a rarity in our house.

Some days it can be very difficult to balance everything – it sometimes feels like you’re juggling so much and none of it very well, but then we step back and realise how very lucky we are.

Do you have outside help, and can you share some tips for how to cope with such a large family?
We have always done things ourselves, even when we were working four jobs between us we never had any help with childcare. It meant we only saw each other two evenings a week (goodness knows how our family grew), but that was how life was.

Tips: Keep bedtimes and mealtimes routine, get to bottom of the laundry basket daily and laugh a lot.

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