“We’re both pretty consistent,” she says. “One thing we both agreed upon was that if we had kids we wanted to raise them in a nice, consistent manner.”

Not that they don’t have their own styles.

“My wife, sometimes she refers to me as her oldest kid,” Kevin says.

He confesses that play can get in the way of chores.

“We all have to chip in and help out a little bit ... we have a lot of stuff to keep up with,” he says. “At the same time, there’s some days where I am so tired of the monotony of laundry and dishes and we’ll say, ‘OK, guys, let’s just go hang out.’”

But that seems OK.

“I have got one of the greatest husbands ever,” Shawnee says. “ I don’t think that God could have put a better guy on Earth, and my kids, I wouldn’t trade anything for them.”

Ray sums up one of the rewards of a stay-at-home dad: “Just hearing a little bitty person say ‘I love you’ just makes you melt.”

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“I found a seed!” Kalum smiles, displaying it between his little thumb and forefinger as he bounds toward his dad. Kelci and Klaton, who’ve been nibbling little green apples from the tree, race over when dad asks, “You want to plant it?”

Within seconds the four youngest children are crouched in a circle around Ray as he scrapes bare a small piece of earth. “Now take the dirt and cover it,” he says.

“Come on Kelci, we’ll put one in the ground.

“Karmel, that’s yours.”

Klaton wonders where he can find a seed. Ray bites a small apple in half. “Check it out, bud. Seed’s in the middle.”

A minute later, the seeds are planted. The scramble ends with the children wiping their hands, dusting off the dirt, moving on to the next impromptu discovery.