About Big Family Playbook

I'm Bree Hollis — mom of five: an eleven-year-old, a nine-year-old, twin six-year-olds, and a toddler who believes bedtime is a group discussion. Before this house, I was a restaurant line cook. On a good Saturday I plated a hundred covers a night, which turns out to be nearly perfect training for feeding seven people daily and getting five kids into a minivan before 7:40am.

Big Family Playbook is the site I couldn't find when kid number three arrived: not a family diary, not chaos-content, but an operations manual. Every post answers one question — how does this actually work when there are five of them? The answer is always a system: prep in batches, label everything, measure before you buy, and never run a play you haven't tested. Everything published here has been run in this house first, on this crew, usually more than once.

Here's how the book is organized: feeding the crew for meal planning and batch-cooking logistics (start with the cheap dinners that scale — it's the spine of the food system), family logistics for mornings, laundry, and room-sharing, cars & car seats for 3-across fits and the minivan question, twins & multiples because I live that one twice at once, and budget & bulk for the money side of running a household at headcount.

What you won't find: martyrdom, chaos-porn, or made-up numbers. When I give a price or a measurement it's either one I took myself or a hedged range, and when a system fails in this house I say so. Big families get sold a lot of sympathy; what we actually need is better logistics.

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