How did she do it? Joyce Maurer shrugs off the question. Yes, raising 10 children – one born every 18 months or so – wasn’t the easiest job. Putting out oil-well fires might be only slightly more taxing. But the 52-year-old mother from Mission reared her brood of eight boys and two girls while working as a registered nurse at night. And four years ago, with four children still at home, she went back to college to get her nursing degree. Meanwhile, her husband, Richard, was putting in six- and seven-day work weeks as operations manager at a trucking company. “He always said he should have been a pediatrician or a grocer,” Maurer says, laughing. They had hoped for a large family, no particular number in mind, and now Maurer says she would not want one less than she had.

The children range in age from 15 to 31. Most have moved out of a household where the clock was set by who had a basketball game or what hour the swim meet began. With so many kids, “some pretty weird stuff would happen,” Maurer says. “One of the brothers stuck straight pins in another’s pillow. Another stuck rocks up his nose because his brother told him to do it.”