As Loudoun Grows, So Do Its Families

Not every block, of course, is teeming with children. Plenty of families have one child. But they say they feel somewhat exceptional. "People look at me funny when I say I have one," Michelle Able said. "Everyone has three or four."

Among such women as Nancy Caruso, there was a sense of relief in finding South Riding, a feeling that whatever pressures existed to have a career and a perfect family drifted away out on the suburban frontier, that if you were inclined to have a big family, you were free to unleash that impulse.

"Before, there was this notion that we were going to screw up the kids if we didn't have this perfect little family," said Caruso, who sidelined her career in law enforcement to stay at home and raise her four kids. "Somewhere along the line, people started to step outside that box. It's common nature to find where you fit in, and I think here you find . . . it's okay to have more kids. Everyone around here does. Everyone supports it."

There's little solid evidence, but some people wonder whether multiple births by women using fertility drugs to have children later in life are helping families grow larger.

Caruso has plenty of friends with four. And she has another, Bethany Narzissenfeld, who stays home with five. She reads romance novels in her downtime and likes to say that she probably belongs in her vision of the 1950s -- maybe back in Waukegan, Ill., where she grew up going to church five times a week.

"I never fell in with the give-women-all-the-same-rights-as-men thing," she said. "I wanted to be a homemaker. I intended not to work. I really get upset when I watch TV, when some liberal woman gets up and talks about what women want. Because she doesn't speak for all women."

Narzissenfeld was folding laundry in her living room, explaining that she had Jacob, Ben, Jared, Rachel and Sam because that's what God gave her, although after Sam, she and her husband decided that they had all the gifts they could handle.

"My husband started thinking about vacations and having so much stuff to haul," she said. "So after Sam, we knew we'd have to stop."

Along the cul-de-sacs and lanes of South Riding, there are self-described conservatives with big families, probably fewer liberals with big families and many in-betweens, people loosely threaded together by their love of kids, Costco, minivans and a buoyant optimism about the trajectory of their lives.

And so, about 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, a pregnant woman power-walked past a pond, a dad led his three girls biking down a sidewalk, and over on Hagen Court, a group of boys played basketball in a driveway in front of the Campbells', where life whisked along. A kid from down the street, Ryan, bounded into the kitchen.

"My clothes?" he asked Lori Campbell, looking for his uniform.

"Your clothes are there," she said, pointing to a pile on the granite countertop. "What do you feel like? Egg and cheese? Bagel? Waffle?"