Eight Is More Than Enough for Most, but Not This Pair

There was no brand-new van parked outside the Malavoltis’ door when they came home last year with eight new children. No new house is on the drawing board; no one has pledged to buy groceries or pay the kids’ college tuition.

All that and more was promised Ken and Bobbi McCaughey in November, when the Iowa couple produced seven babies in one blessed event.

That story was trumpeted around the world: the devout, wholesome couple--still in their 20s, with a baby in diapers--who took fertility drugs to conceive a second child, and wound up with seven they dubbed “a blessing from God.”

Back in their hometown of Rockford, Ill., Rose and Al Malavolti didn’t catch much news about the miracle babies.

They were too busy keeping their own miracle on track--what with 30 loads of laundry each week, five hours of homework a night and dozens of meals to make each day for a brood that had grown from two children at home to 10 when the couple took in eight children whose mother had died.

It would be nice, Rose thought, to have a van that people didn’t laugh at when it rumbled down the street, that didn’t leak when it rained. It would be great to move out of their cramped house, to replace the washer that broke down again the week before Christmas, the freezer that died, the VCR that gave out.

But they don’t begrudge the McCaugheys their bounty.

“I’m grateful that family’s had so many people to care for them,” Rose said this week.

“But when I think about all the sibling groups out there that are not cared for, that have to be split up or moved from home to home . . . well, I wish somebody would look after them too.”

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It’s a major challenge facing adoption agencies. Not many people are open to the idea of taking more than one child, yet sibling groups comprise the majority of the kids free for adoption through public agencies in Los Angeles and across the country.

Rose traces her willingness to a moment in third grade, when her favorite teacher told the story of growing up in institutions with her orphaned siblings.

“She remembered how on Sundays the orphanage opened up and people could come to child-shop,” Rose recalls. “So every Saturday night, she would wash and iron her one good dress, bathe her sisters and curl their hair, and hope and pray that somebody would take them home. But nobody ever did.

“And every Sunday night [as a child], this wonderful, giving woman cried herself to sleep. I vowed right then and there that I would make a difference in the life of unwanted kids.”

But the family’s search for a group of siblings to adopt was torturously slow, interrupted by Al’s bout with cancer, the births of their own four children and a series of financial setbacks.

“It was like God took that time to stretch our hearts so we could accommodate all eight of these kids,” Rose says.

A religion teacher at a Catholic school, Rose sees God’s hand in every move the family makes. It was a series of chance meetings with a trio of nuns that led them last January to a Laredo, Texas, hospital room.

There they promised a dying Blanca Hernandez--whom they’d never met--that they’d care for her eight children.

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Since their story was told on local news last month--and relayed by wire services around the world--a day hasn’t gone by without a writer or producer offering the Malavoltis money to tell their story. They’ve turned down almost every request.

Never mind that the McCaughey septuplets have an agent already.

“We really don’t have time for that kind of thing,” Rose says. “And we’re not interested in being made out to be saints. It’s God that gets the credit.”

So if you’re looking for miracles, for signs of God working in people’s lives, shift your gaze from the septuplet spectacle in Iowa to Rockford, Ill., where eight already-born children have found a loving home, against all odds.

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* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.