Having a baby completely changes your life, every parent says, and 99 percent of the time it's hyperbole.
Most of the time, we parents are exaggerating.
Having a baby doesn't change every aspect of your life. Sure, you drift away from friends, you stop seeing movies, you become comfortable with heretofore unfamiliar bodily fluids .
But it's still recognizably your life.
Unless you're Billy or Lindsay Sobczyk.
Having a baby actually turned the Omaha couple's life upside down (and shook it all around) — though it's hard to say which baby did it .
Was it Dorothy? Or was it Bernadette?
Billy, 31, and Lindsay, 30, were working as family-teachers at Boys Town last year when they found out Lindsay was pregnant.
Family-teachers are married couples who anchor households on the Boys Town campus.
"It's not really a job," Lindsay says, "it's a lifestyle."
It's sort of like being a professional stay-at-home parent, Billy says. Your whole life is taking care of the kids in your house and running the household. The Sobzcyks had eight girls in their home — plus their own 2-year-old daughter, Edith Ann.
And they loved it.
You can have children of your own and be a family-teacher, though two is usually the limit. Edith Ann was born after the Sobczyks started at Boys Town, and they were excited to welcome a second child.
Then they found out that their second child had brought a plus one.
At first the reality of the situation didn't click. Lindsay and Billy called their boss excitedly — we're having twins!
You're having twins?
Having newborn twins is hard enough on its own. Having a house full of teenage girls is hard enough on its own. It became (almost) immediately clear that the Sobczyks would have to leave their Boys Town family.
Which meant completely starting over.
New kids.
New jobs.
A new place to live.
Billy and Lindsay had never had a place of their own, not really. After they were married in 2006, they went to live in London and stayed in hostels and a rented room— then came back to Omaha the next year and started at Boys Town.
They had wedding gifts they hadn't even opened.
It felt strange to be shopping for a house and a bigger car while they were looking for jobs .
The hardest part of the transition — aside from saying good-bye to the girls in their Boys Town family, which was brutal — was trying to decide what to do next. They'd already found a job that they loved, where they felt like they were part of the community and really making a difference.
The transition was slightly easier for Lindsay, who was hired at Boys Town to work as an in-home family consultant, sort of a visiting social worker.
Billy wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He found a part-time job and went back to school to study graphic design .
The twins arrived in September before their parents had quite figured out what do with them. Would Bernadette and Dorothy go to daycare? Would Lindsay stay home? Would Billy?
"Ideally," Billy said, "we'd both stay home."
One of the lovely things about working as family-teachers was the way they were both home to witness all of Edith Ann's milestones — it was sad to think of Edith getting so much more attention than her sisters.
By the time Lindsay's maternity leave was over, daycare seemed like a ridiculous idea. One person would be working just to pay for it.
The couple decided that Billy would stay home because Lindsay really loves her job. And then they braced themselves for more changes, all the sacrifices they'd have to make to live on one salary.
The Sobczyks were already living lean, but they looked for ways to live leaner.
They got rid of their cellphones and switched back to an Internet-based landline. (That's actually why I first called them - who's going back to a landline these days?)
They committed to cloth diapers. They shopped for second-hand stuff instead of at Target. They stopped buying canned beans because dried beans are cheaper.
They gave up eating out altogether. Almost.
"When the new Qdoba opened," Lindsay said, "we stood in line for like three hours to get free burritos for a year."
"Which is great," Billy said, "because we love burritos."
That sort of sums up the Sobczyks' attitude about all of this change and upheaval.
Although they didn't plan for this scenario — they wouldn't have planned it like this — they're still full of smiles. (Even their babies are smiling. Can 4-month-old babies smile?)
The last year has been scary, but they're all together, and nobody died, and change is good, Billy says.
"I kind of feel like we've always been risk takers, so all the things we've done since we've been married have been — let's take the leap and see where it goes, and we end up doing OK .
"Things are going to keep being OK," he says. "Things are going to keep getting better."
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