The Duck Commander Family (20 page)

In the meantime, I still wasn’t taking birth control. It all happened so fast, and I was too busy making bottles and changing diapers to think about it. For our tenth wedding
anniversary in January 2002, Willie surprised me with a trip to Cancún, Mexico. We drove to Dallas, and I thought we were just going to spend a few days there. Always the romantic, Willie didn’t tell me we were going to Mexico until he handed me a note at the airport! It was an awesome surprise, but I was a little reluctant leaving our two-month-old baby at home. Thankfully, my mom was in on the surprise and was fully prepared for and capable of caring for the three little ones we had left with her and my dad. Willie and I had an awesome time in Cancún—it was the first real trip we had had since having kids—and we enjoyed it to its fullest. We came home refreshed and renewed and thankful for our life together.

Needless to say, I was a little shocked about a month later when I found out I was pregnant, but with that news we were even more certain of God’s plan for our life. God had closed my womb until Will was in our home, and then opened it to give us our fourth child. Our baby girl, Bella Chrysanne, was born in September 2002. So that’s how we came to have two babies just ten months apart.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that things were nuts there for a while. And I can promise you, while I helped in the discipline department, it’s Korie who gets all the credit for doing the hard work. She is an incredible mom and has always taken the role of motherhood very seriously. I don’t know how she did it all, but she did, usually with a baby on each hip. This was also my motivation to start being good at business, so I could provide enough money for all these younguns. Let me tell you
something: KIDS AIN’T CHEAP. Doctor bills, food, Pampers, and all that other stuff cost money, and I committed to go and push myself further to bring home more bacon, and a lot more cabbage, as in cash.

It’s amazing how when you have four children, you get four different personalities. You would think that when you raise kids the same way in the same home with the same values, they should all turn out the same, right? Wrong. God made every child special, with a unique personality and temperament, fears and hopes, likes and dislikes. And aren’t we glad He didn’t make us all the same? Life is just so much more interesting that way. Not to mention challenging.

Korie:
John Luke and Sadie had their own unique challenges. John Luke was hospitalized with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus, which causes respiratory tract infections) when he was three months old and it seemed to damage his lungs, so we spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office with wheezing, bronchitis, and pneumonia, but other than that, he was an easy, fun kid to raise. He loved to read, just like I do, so we spent hours reading books, and he seemed to love to learn about everything. He was also a climber who loved the outdoors. He loved animals so much so that at one point we weren’t sure if he would follow in the family hunting tradition. He had every kind of animal, from goats to rabbits, to snakes, to leopard geckos, to an iguana.

One time, when he was about six years old, he and Willie
found a bat down at the camp that for some reason they decided they were going to nurse back to health. We set up a little cage for the bat on our back porch and warned John Luke not to touch him. He begged and begged to touch the bat, and one day decided that he would not really be touching him if he put on gloves first. So he put on some of my yellow rubber kitchen gloves and without my knowing tried to pick up the bat! Of course, the bat bit him on his little finger. He came and told me what he had done and showed me. Sure enough, there were two little bite marks on his finger. I immediately Googled what you do for bat bites and found out that bats are highly likely to carry rabies! We rushed John Luke to the hospital. They gave him the first round of rabies shots just in case and said that they would have to test the bat. If the bat tested positive for rabies, then John Luke would have to go through about five rounds of shots. The doctor asked if we still had the bat and said that we had to turn it in to have it tested for rabies. That’s when John Luke started crying. “He doesn’t have rabies, I know he doesn’t. It’s not the bat’s fault!” he cried. He was devastated that they had to kill the bat to test him because of something he had done. John Luke said that he would get the shots so that the bat wouldn’t have to be tested. This was huge. John Luke hated shots and still does, but he was willing to get more if he could only save the bat.

As John Luke got older and started hunting with Willie, he took to it naturally. I guess it’s in his blood, as they say. The first time John Luke killed a deer, he was so proud to be able to feed our family. We ate on it for weeks. He was becoming a man and fully understood the circle of life. I’m so proud of the young man he has become. He is a leader at his school and at our church and an incredible big brother to his younger siblings.

Our daughter Sadie Carroway was as healthy as she could be. I had her in the summer when Camp Ch-Yo-Ca’s sessions were in full swing. Her delivery was easy, and I was at the camp with her when she was only a few days old. The kids passed her around and loved on her. I was a young mom and didn’t worry a bit about germs. Maybe that’s why she never gets sick: she was exposed to everything with all those little hands touching her as a baby, and she developed immunities. Who knows? She was like the little camp mascot. She was a happy baby who reached for her bed when she was tired. But she seemed to have a stronger spirit than John Luke. We could tell from an early age that she was going to be a competitive little one. She loves sports and had a baseball birthday party at two years old! She’s got a lot of her daddy in her. She loves to entertain and make people laugh.

When Sadie was only four years old, she was already doing impersonations of all the family members—just like her dad. She also went through a stage where she would preach. It was the cutest thing we had ever seen. We have a video of her preaching where she says, “It doesn’t matter if you are
a teacher or a stealer, a policeman or a jail person. God still loves you, and He wants you to be in heaven with Him. He doesn’t want you to go down there with the devil. He loves you and He will forgive all your sins. All you have to do is ask Him. . . .” It goes on and on. She sings some songs, then she breaks into a cheer. “Let’s give it up for God!” she shouts. She had so much wisdom for such a little one. Willie nicknamed her “the Original” from the time she could talk. It fits her perfectly.

Then came Will and Bella. These two little ones who had come into our life around the same time were quite the handful! Will was a very happy baby. He would literally wake up laughing. We loved to listen to him talking to himself in his bed for a while when he first woke up. He was a very easy baby; then he became a very busy toddler!

Bella wasn’t so easy as a baby but is the most fun child one could ever have. She contracted salmonella when she was only three weeks old. It was terrifying! We never found out for sure how she got it. There were some other cases of salmonella from formula that had been reported, but we had also picked up a turtle on the side of the road coming home from church that day. Turtles can sometimes carry salmonella. She, of course, didn’t touch the turtle, but one of us could have touched it and then passed it to her. We just weren’t sure. Anyway, I was holding her that night when all of
a sudden she felt warm. A three-week-old baby should never have a fever.

I knew immediately something was wrong. We rushed her to the hospital. They didn’t know what was wrong with her, so they did a spinal tap to make sure she didn’t have meningitis. It was horrible to see our little baby go through that ordeal. By the next morning she was having severe diarrhea. It took several days before they figured out exactly what was wrong with her and gave her antibiotics she needed to make her better. She was so sick and was in the hospital for about a week. She lost weight and was the tiniest little thing, but eventually made a full recovery and we were very thankful!

Poor thing, though, she had stomach trouble for about a year after this. She just couldn’t hold down anything. I had to feed her every three hours, even through the night, until she was about nine months old, just to try to put some meat on her bones. She cried so much she was perpetually hoarse. But she was the most beautiful little thing and had the most confident little spirit. She started walking at nine months old. Those little toothpick legs didn’t look like they could hold her up, but they did, and once she started walking, she was off.

Like I said, the babies were only ten months apart, so Will wasn’t even walking when Bella was born. But once they both started walking, there was no stopping them. We called them Destructo 1 and Destructo 2. I used to tell people that one would raise the window and the other would climb out. This was our life for a while. I couldn’t keep my eyes on them enough to keep them out of trouble. Bella seemed to have
a perpetual knot on her head and our house was always a wreck. If Will and Bella were left alone for any length of time, I can promise you something was going to be destroyed. They would squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube and smear it all over the bathroom mirror, get into the pantry and dump all the cereal out of the boxes—and this was all before eight
A.M.
!