Life inside Australia's biggest family: Mother of sixteen does six loads of washing a day, buys 50 litres of milk and 14 boxes of cereal a week
A mother-of-16 has admitted the idea of having children was not always appealing to her.
Jeni Bonell, from Toowoomba in Queensland's south-east, said she had not wanted to have children when she was a teenager, let alone 16.
'I just had other plans for my life and just wasn't really interested at all in children and not even getting married at that stage,' Ms Bonell, 47, told Daily Mail Australia.
'I just thought... they [children] were small and hard to understand.'
But her life took a different turn when she met husband Ray who expressed a wish to have a large family after growing up as the first-born of six.
'He managed to talk me into a couple and it was me who went back and asked for a third one,' Ms Bonell said.
'Once I met Ray and we had a boy and girl, having a pigeon pair... it was me who desperately who wanted to have a third one.'
Today the couple have 16 and are open to the notion of adding to their brood.
The family guzzles 50 litres of milk a week, eats about $600 worth of groceries a week and washes about 30 kilograms of clothes a day.
The couple have Jesse, 26, Brooke, 25, Claire, 23, Natalie, 21, Karl, 19, Samuel, 18, Cameron, 16, Sabrina, 15, Timothy, 13, Brandon, 11, Eve, 10, Nate, nine, Rachel, eight, Eric, six, Damian, five, and Katelyn, two.
'Any number would not be high enough now,' Ms Bonell told Daily Mail Australia.
'Once we had miscarried seven [babies] over the years, once you lose the first one, you appreciate just how much of a blessing children are.
'We threw ourselves into being great parents.'
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