With the help of their three sons, nine loaves of bread and seven gallons of milk would disappear in one week. The boys could also help their parents and sisters consume 32 scrambled eggs for their morning start.

"We learned early on that it was cheaper to feed them hot meals for breakfast than to buy cold cereal," says Jenny Middleton, mother of 10.

Raising a large family like theirs doesn't just boil down to quantity, but moms like Jenny Middleton, who teaches first grade at Graystone Elementary School, probably will receive more Mother's Day wishes on Sunday than women who have fewer children. It's something Paul Middleton looks forward to when Father's Day rolls around.

"On Father's Day, all the kids and in-laws are calling. All day long I get calls from all over the country. I get 12 to 15 phone calls wishing me a happy Father's Day," he says. "I love it."

There have always been a pile of gifts to be opened on Mother's Day, too, says their eldest daughter, Rochelle Petersen.

Some of those 10 gifts Jenny Middleton received for past Mother's Days were handmade by the younger children, and often the girls would sing a song that they learned in church.

"Several of my sisters would play the piano and we would sing," Petersen remembers. "We sang those songs that you learn in primary [school]--'Mother, I Love You.' Even though we were teenagers, we were singing those songs."

Petersen was almost 17 when Jenny and Paul Middleton each brought their five children from previous marriages together. Now 30, Petersen is the oldest of the mega-sized real-life Brady Bunch that makes up the Middleton/Carter combined family.

The house was "crazy" and always had a "happy noise," Jenny Middleton says. Petersen says the girls, three of whom are Jenny's daughters and four are Paul's, loved dancing and singing around the house.

"Some of my boyfriends didn't appreciate all the dancing and singing," Petersen says. "They would be like, 'Why are they singing those camp songs again?' "

It seems to Petersen that there was always someone in the house, so there was always someone to talk to or hang out with. And for the younger ones, there was always someone to play with.

Chris Pantiga, who grew up in another large Almaden Valley family, says it was an advantage but one she didn't always welcome.

"Definitely there was always somebody there, sometimes to your disappointment," she says.

Pantiga grew up in New Almaden with seven siblings, two of whom were adopted and who are "two months and nine days" younger than her, which turned the three into "the triplets."

Pantiga now has a family that is less than half the size of her mother's, and she is in awe of how her mother, Cecyl Pantiga, survived. "I have twins right now who are 16 months old, and a 4-year-old. I don't know how she did it," she says.

Cecyl Pantiga's husband, Manny, went to medical school in Mexico, leaving his wife to work full time in her nursing career and care for their eight children. Their close friend Kitty Monahan moved into the home to help Cecyl Pantiga with the children during that time.

Cecyl Pantiga says she got more help from other neighbors, friends, and the elementary school where her children attended school. The secretary at what is now Challenger School--it was Hacienda when her children attended the school--was always willing to lend a hand, and if the Pantiga children missed the bus the principal of the school would jump in his pick-up truck and go get them.

"You know, it's like Hillary Clinton says--'It takes a village,' " Cecyl Pantiga says, adding that her village was the New Almaden community.

Managing such a large household as the Pantiga's or the Middleton/Carter's is an "organizational effort," Paul Middleton says.

Sheri Holt, a fifth-grade teacher at Graystone Elementary and mother of seven children, agrees but states it matter-of-factly with a shrug of her shoulders. "The logistics of raising a big family are not a big deal," says the Almaden resident.

Holt says that having a large family didn't happen all at once. Each child--every one of them planned, she says, including four in four years--was added one at a time, making the transition from five to six, or six to seven, for example, virtually seamless.

She says she learned to delegate household chores and became a master at managing money, time and scheduling.

It's a skill she has carried over into her teaching career.

"A lot of my teaching comes from my parenting experience. It's the defining part of what I am as a teacher," Holt says.

Holt brings many of her own family experiences into the classroom via photographs and stories about each of her children. She shares with her students the strengths and weaknesses of her own family so that her pupils might find a personal connection with her.

Holt has many philosophies on child rearing, some book-learned, some from experience and some from an innate sense bolstered by high expectations for sound morals and good judgment.

To Holt, doing two to three loads of laundry each day was just part of life. But Jenny Middleton says when a family has that many children, they have to learn to share in the responsibilities. So she taught all 10 of her children to do their own laundry.

"You just have to learn to let go of the wrinkles," Middleton says.

For the four years when all 10 of her children were under the same roof, they all learned to wash, dry and fold their own clothes, including 4-year-old Ty, who is now a senior at Pioneer High School.

"I did have to help Ty a little bit. I'd take the wet clothes out of the washer for him and put them in the dryer because he was too short to reach then," she says. "But he would fold them all by himself and put them away."

The Middleton and Carter brood--two of whom remain at the parental home--also assembled their own lunches to take to school each day. Food would be placed out in the kitchen for them each morning and they would work their way down the counter, assembly-line style, putting in their bags those items they would eat later for lunch.

Making their own lunches, doing their own laundry and other household chores, and learning to manage their own money is what Holt refers to as "life skills," something she sees as a gift to the spouses, or future spouses, of each of her children.

"We told them, 'You're not doing us a favor. You are a citizen of the family,' " she says of teaching her children to help with household chores.

Those families, large in number to begin with, were rarely without a friend or two being welcomed in the mix.

"If you have eight kids, you always have one or two more. I don't think we ever sat down to dinner and didn't have at least one extra there," Cecyl Pantiga says.

The Pantiga household always had room for friends when someone needed a place to land, and Cecyl Pantiga says that at one point, when her own home was being remodeled, she and her eight children moved in with a friend who had six children of her own.

"We were able to get them all in the same car. That was before car seats, of course. When we would stop at a stop sign you could see people counting them," she says.

A house full of children acts like a magnet, drawing even more, these mothers all say. And that's what they preferred--having their children at home where they could keep an eye on them.

Jenny Middleton says she and her husband tried to create a home that was fun for their own children, adding a pool, pool table and other activities for home entertainment. Their sons and daughters agree that their home was the popular place to be.

"It was kind of like a big playhouse," says Kyle Middleton.

"In reality all my friends loved to come over," says his sister Rochelle Petersen.

It was usually a fun and active lifestyle--though they say the normal amount of family squabbles occurred--and the children of these large families were involved in extracurricular activities such as sports, cheerleading and music.

In a 1994 Christmas letter that Paul Middleton sent out, he chronicles "carving 144 pounds of pumpkins; dyeing 72 Easter eggs; lighting a dozen birthday cakes; attending 56 soccer games, 32 volleyball games, eight swim meets, 38 cheerleading events; driving to 373 sports practices, 104 piano lessons, 31 dance and choir rehearsals, plus 20 church volleyball games and 16 basketball games; sitting through 72 orthodontic appointments; folding and throwing 786,200 newspapers [for the family paper route] and eating over 12,800 meals."

The parents and siblings all agree that being part of a large family was a great experience filled with lots of happy memories.

Kyle Middleton says he and his wife want to have a large family. They have three children and "will definitely have more," but having a lot of children isn't necessarily for everyone.

"Growing up in a big family was a good experience, but not one I'm going to follow," Chris Pantiga says. "I don't know how my mom did it working full time and raising a big family."

Big families can create big messes and lots of noise, but Kyle Middleton says there wasn't any place for messes in the home when he was growing up. Cecyl Pantiga says that when her eight-child family was staying with her friend and her six children, neighbors would come over to marvel at how clean the house was.

Though the families never wanted for toys, games or other things to do in these homes, Holt says they did have neighbors whose one or two children would receive more gifts at Christmas than her seven did combined. Not much explanation was necessary of the seeming disparity, she says.

It was like a light bulb lit over their heads when they "got it," she says, and they would say to her, "Oh, we have brothers and sisters instead of toys."