Published: March 29, 2008 08:01 pm            

ELIZABETH DUELAND: The more the merrier

Elizabeth Dueland studied biology at UAB and then Samford, but her heart was never really in it. Her career ambition was to be a stay-at-home mother, as her own mother had been, and to reach the pinnacle of that line of work by having as many kids as she could.

“I always knew I wanted to be a full-time mom,” she said. “But when I got out of high school, I knew I needed some sort of foundation, so I studied for a degree in biology.”

Dueland went to College at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and then transferred to Samford University in Birmingham, where she met her future husband Dr. David Dueland in 1994.

“Dave was working at HealthSouth as an orthopedic surgeon while I was doing an internship there over the summer,” she said. “As we became friendly, Dave was encouraging me to go to medical school. I thought about it a lot, but when we got close and I started to realize, ‘This is the man I am going to marry,’ all of a sudden I wasn’t interested in a career any more. So now I have a biology degree and five kids.”

Dueland moved back to her parents’ house after she graduated from Stanford and worked at Cullman Internal Medicine as a nurses’ aide for two years. She married Dr. Dueland — who now works at Cullman Regional Orthopedics and Sports Medicine — in 1999.

“We got married in April, and by October, David Jr. was on the way,” she said. “We didn’t waste any time starting a family.”

She continued to work at Cullman Internal Medicine during her pregnancy, but got off the career wagon as soon as her son was born.

“I enjoyed working there,” she said. “The doctors’ wives were my best friends from when we were little and we had fun together, but I would much rather be at home with my kids than work. And there is no way I could hold down a job now with this crowd.”

Dave and Elizabeth’s children are David Jr., 8, Max, 6, and Jake, 5, who all attend St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Cullman, along with Kathryn, 2, and Rachel, who is 10 months old. Dueland said she never had a second thought about having a big family.

“I just figured, ‘I have always wanted kids, I may as well have five as have one,’” she said.

In the first half of every year, the party decorations barely come down at all in the Dueland household.

“Dave and I have January birthdays,” she said. “And then the kids’ birthdays are February, March, April, May and June. You would think we planned it to have a birthday party every month.”

Sometimes when the children have birthday parties, Dueland only invites two of her best friends to bring their kids, but that doesn’t mean they are subdued affairs.

“Two of my best friends, Amy Wood and Joy Barker, have big families too,” she said. “I remember standing with them with all the kids around us and saying, ‘Do you realize we have 13 kids between us?’”

Dueland said there is never a dull moment with her family, and that is the way she likes it.

“Some of my friends will call me up and say that they are bored every now and then,” she said. “But there is always something lively going on around here, and especially when I am on the phone. That’s their cue to play up.”

Getting everyone to sleep at night is also an ordeal that has become even more of a problem in the past few weeks, according to Dueland.

“The four oldest kids sleep in bunk beds in the same room, and lately with the time change, it has been chaos every night,” she said. “They don’t want to go to bed at night and they all keep each other up. And then they don’t want to get up to go to school in the morning.”

Three weeks ago the whole family, except for David Sr., had strep throat.

“We had to test the whole family and treat everybody at the same time so we wouldn’t spread it back and forth,” she said. “We all had to make a trip to the pharmacy. I drove up to the window with the five kids in the back and told the pharmacy tech, ‘Tell the owner his ship has come in.’”

After everyone recovered it was David Sr.’s turn to get sick.

“He hardly ever gets sick,” said Dueland. “And when he does, he doesn’t get it as bad as the rest of us, but he acts like the biggest baby. Men always think they are on their death beds when they get the slightest cold. I said to him, ‘Try taking care of five kids and being sick at the same time.’”

The hardest thing about having so many kids, according to Dueland, is getting anywhere on time. A simple trip to the grocery store becomes a major ordeal with five children to strap into car seats and to keep all in the same spot, so Dueland asks her mother and mother-in-law to babysit some of the kids if she needs to go shopping.

“My husband probably couldn’t find the grocery store if he had to,” laughed Dueland. “But seriously, he is the best father I could imagine. I asked him once if he would ever like to swap places with me and he said ‘Absolutely not. I couldn’t do what you do.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m glad you noticed.’”

“As busy and as overwhelmed as he is when he gets home from work, he takes the time to give them all individual attention,” said Dueland. “Even when he is exhausted he will do something special with them like take them out around the neighborhood on the four-wheeler or play ball games with them. I really couldn’t say enough good things about him as a father and as a husband.”

Dueland said that while her philosophy has always been “the more the merrier,” she feels now that her family is complete and ready to be enjoyed.

“I think I have enough on my plate for now,” she laughed. “In all the daily chaos, I just try to concentrate on what is important. The thing that made the biggest impression on me was something my husband’s grandmother Kathryn said when she was on her deathbed. Dave asked her what was the happiest day of her life, and she said ‘Every day that my children were young.’ I loved that. I am not rushing my children to grow up.”

        

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