THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505030058
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 220 lines
SEVEN MINUTES past dawn, the seven Cornwell boys start climbing out of their seven beds. Window shades block the sun in the living room. The smell of coffee wafts from the kitchen.
Three-year-old Joseph, in diapers and a T-shirt, is balled up on the sofa, his eyelids squeezed shut. His head is buried in his daddy's lap. Ernie Cornwell, 37, has one ear tuned to the TV news, the other to the soft thump of feet on the second floor.
``The carnage starts in a few minutes,'' he warns wryly, his boyish face breaking into a grin. Fine lines radiate from the corner of each eye as he smiles toward his wife.
Mary-Ellen Cornwell chuckles softly, her head tipped against a sofa. Scavenger, the black lab, snores next to her. These are her last few seconds of peace before the house breaks out in boys, boys and more boys.
In the next hour, Patrick will wolf down his bagel and leave for high school, Joseph will uncoil from the sofa, and Kevin, Brendan, Brian, Timothy and Jack will bound down the stairs desperately seeking cereal.
In an age of two- and three-children families, Ernie and Mary-Ellen Cornwell are raising seven sons, 3 to 16 years old, in a yellow-shuttered house on South Plaza Trail in Virginia Beach.
Seven boys means having 14 clean socks ready every morning. It means spooning out medicine to three or four sick kids at a time. It means hauling out the potty-chair and training pants every few years. It means spreading discipline and kisses in seven directions. It means doing 25 loads of laundry a week.
And it means trying to stretch a dollar from here to eternity. Ernie and Mary-Ellen pay into a college fund that will eventually buy each boy two years of junior college. Mary-Ellen relentlessly coupon-shops all over town, looking for bargains like 10 cans of tuna hooked together, huge bags of rice and sugar and piles and piles of pasta.
And then, of course, there's the logistics of keeping track of where everyone is supposed to be, whose birthday it is this week, what chores need to be done. At times, the house looks as tired as Mom and Dad.
``We have three broken windows right now,'' she says, sighing. ``All those happened within two days. They're not fixed not because of the expense, but because there's no time. There's just no time. There's no time to do anything.''
Except raise kids and work.
Ernie Cornwell is in the Navy.
Nights and weekends he works a second job busing tables at an elegant restaurant. The nights he's home, his wife goes to her part-time job selling magazine subscriptions over the phone. She's saving to become a birthing instructor. Her pay's not terrific and the hours aren't great, but working nights, she doesn't need a baby sitter.
If there were more time, says Mary-Ellen, who is 36, she'd clean more.
``I'm not a great housekeeper,'' she says. ``But they have clean clothes and good food and that's all I can do right now.''
The family spends Sundays together, arriving at Fort Story's First Landing Chapel in two vehicles. If they fill out a balcony pew, it's been a good week - nobody's left home sick.
Their family started with Patrick. At 16, he's a tall, muscular teenager with a thatch of long, dark hair. A soccer player, he's also Joseph's hero, despite the 13 years between them.
``They're probably the two closest in the family,'' says their mother as Patrick putters in the kitchen.
Every time he opens the fridge, green sheets of paper stuck to the door with magnets flutter in the breeze. One is a school honor roll, the other lists students who made all A's. Three of the Cornwell boys' names appear. In easy, familiar moves, Mary-Ellen's oldest son rescues a Wiffle ball from the top of the refrigerator for a howling Joseph, eats the first few bites of bagel standing up, pours milk, stirs juice.
His mom buys half a dozen packages of bagels at a time, 12 gallons of milk each week, a loaf of bread for each day.
It's 6:45 when Patrick wolfs down the last of his breakfast, grabs his knapsack and pushes through the screenless door to catch the bus.
His parents get a few seconds to brace for the tumble of boys who trip downstairs next. The first is Brian, 9, who shows up in pajamas, carrying shorts and a shirt.
``Is this OK to wear today?'' he asks, draping the ensemble over the back of a sofa.
``I never do all of the laundry where I can say this is all and there's none left,'' Mary-Ellen says. She spends hours folding clothes on a dining room table that is long enough to host an executive conference. She doesn't bother to match socks. Just tosses them into a blue plastic milk crate. To keep things simple, 75 percent of them are white. If somebody needs a pair, he digs till he finds a set.
``Maybe once a week or so somebody gets in trouble and has to sort socks,'' she says.
Living in a family this large calls for a lot of cooperation. Kevin, the second oldest at 12, says the crowd gets to him sometimes.
``It's noisiest when everybody's home,'' he says. ``Sometimes I lock myself in my room and listen to the radio.'' Good idea. Only problem is, it's not just Kevin's room.
The boys, except for Patrick, share. That's about to change.
``Everybody's getting bigger and it's not fair to have three in two rooms and one by himself,'' says their mom. So Patrick will get a roommate - Kevin.
Right now, Kevin is missing. Mary-Ellen Cornwell, one hand on the bannister, hollers up the stairs.
``Kevin, you gotta move.'' She settles Joseph into his highchair in front of a bowl of Cheerios with sliced banana. Minutes later, the 3-year-old hops down and yells.
Mary-Ellen puzzles over Joseph, red-faced and louder by the second.
``Joseph, swallow what's in your mouth. I can't understand you.'' Suddenly it dawns on her.
She grabs him up and runs to the door, ``Blow Daddy a kiss, quick!'' she says, waving desperately at her husband's truck.
Ernie Cornwell has started for his car, balancing a pink plastic tumbler full of coffee. He teaches explosive ordnance disposal with the Navy's bomb squad at Fort Story. It's 7:15.
If mornings look hectic, Mary-Ellen says later, evenings are harder. Every night of the week there's just one adult home to make dinner. Kids are doing homework, or not wanting to do homework, or waiting for the dishwasher to finish so they can set the table.
``Mornings seem easier,'' she says, brushing back dark hair that's started graying at her temples. ``I think it's because I'm semi-comatose in the morning.''
The Cornwells met in 10th grade in St. Petersburg, Florida. Two years later, after high school graduation, Ernie joined the Navy and Mary-Ellen started college in Gainesville, studying to be a medical technologist.
A year later, in 1977, Ernie showed up at her parents' house with a U-Haul. They loaded up her things, her border collie and eloped to Charleston, South Carolina and the Navy's base chapel.
``I was 19 when I got married,'' she says. ``I don't recommend it.'' She had Patrick at 20 and in a few years had three - a kindergartner, a toddler and an infant.
``Once we had three, a fourth didn't matter,'' she says. ``We were like, what's one more? We're already nuts.''
When she was pregnant with their fifth child, Mary-Ellen was so sure it was a girl she bought barrettes and tiny leotards, and even picked out a name - Kathleen.
It didn't happen.
Having all boys is economical in a way. Baby clothes go clear down the line. Joseph wore what Patrick wore 13 years earlier. But as they grow, outfits are passed just once. Boys are hard on clothes, their mother sighs.
By 7:30 Brendan, 4, is up and Kevin is tying his shoes. At the beginning of the school year, it takes $500 to put sneakers on the boys' seven pairs of feet. The family spreads the cost out over two months. Haircuts have a similar solution. Their parents take two to three boys at a time to the barbershop.
Any more, says Mary-Ellen, and they'd take up all the chairs.
``Kevin, if you don't leave now, you're going to miss your bus,'' she warns, herding her second-oldest toward the door. ``And you might want to put your cello over your shoulder and carry your backpack. That way, if you drop something, it'll be the backpack.'' The backpack was $12. The cello, $1,000. Kevin, a seventh-grader at Independence Middle School, plays in the school's orchestra.
Just as Kevin heads out the door with a kiss from mom, a fight breaks out in the living room between Brendan and Joseph. Something about a frog.
``Say you're sorry,'' Mary-Ellen tells them both. She makes them hug.
Timothy hits the bottom step. He's 10, a gymnast and musician who plays the recorder. Jack shows up. He's 7. Missing is Brian, the 9-year-old, a voracious reader who attends the school district's gifted program. His brother Jack goes to an in-school enrichment program.
``Brian.'' ``Brian.'' Finally a no-kidding ``Brian-n-n!'' rattles the staircase.
Fifteen minutes later the trio is busily eating. Mary-Ellen watches from the sofa, her two youngest sons draped across her lap. Then Kevin slips back through the door. He missed the bus.
Mary-Ellen sighs and rubs her forehead, ``Well, you'll just have to wait till 9 because I can't take you until everybody's gone.''
Timothy, Brian and Jack finish breakfast, dress, slip on their backpacks and sit hunched forward on the edge of the sofa like birds on a rooftop, waiting for time to leave. Shortly before 9, she slicks down their hair, smacks a kiss on each head, and points them to the door. They head for Windsor Woods Elementary on foot.
The Cornwell boys are growing up. A shelf full of athletic trophies, school certificates and ribbons tells their parents that they're off to a good start. But their mom can't rest.
``I worry that for one reason or another they won't get the right guidance and that I'll miss something and that somebody'll end up in jail or in trouble,'' she says.
``They give you so much love and affection, and the things they say, how they perceive the world, is so funny. Brian once asked me what if we all just had one long hair that stuck up from the tops of our heads.
``And when Tim was 3, he said he wanted to be an elephant when he grew up.
It might be easier with fewer children, but not as much fun.
``If I had to do it over again,'' says Mary-Ellen Cornwell, leaning against the kitchen sink, ``I'd do it differently, but I'd still have this many kids.'' ILLUSTRATION: TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff color photos
The Cornwell family, from left: brothers Brendan, 4; Jack, 7; Brian,
9; Timothy, 10; Kevin, 12; Patrick, 16; and Joseph, 3; with their
parents, Ernie and Mary-Ellen.
``You might want to put your cello over your shoulder and carry your
backpack,'' Mom calls to Kevin as he rushes off to meet the school
bus.
Mary-Ellen Cornwell punishes Joseph for misbehavior by making him
sit in the corner for three minutes.
Photos
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Ernie Cornwell hurriedly eats lunch on a Sunday afternoon before
running errands. He's a Navy man who works a second job busing
tables to help support his family.
From left, Brendan, Joseph, Timothy and Brian watch cartoons before
the two older boys head off to school on a weekday morning.
by CNB