It takes a carefully constructed color-coded calendar to raise nine children.

It takes lots of late-night trips to the grocery store.

It takes love. Rules. Faith. Grace.

And pinpoint accurate financial planning.

The Sterling family has all that and more.

Howard and Linda Sterling of Auburn have been married for 15 years and have four birth children and five foster and adopted children. The couple claim to have no real routine for the household, but that’s not exactly the case. Without some routine, there would be chaos in their seven-bedroom home.

Despite the haphazard pile of bikes in the front yard, clothes piled on stairs and the array of toys dropped around the in-ground pool, there is little chaos in this house. There are nine children who make their beds in the morning, help put away groceries, serve their own dishes and generally keep their rooms picked up.

When the basement-to-third-floor laundry chute fills up, they all pitch in to get the clothes clean.

“They all have to help,” Linda said. Really.

It’s tough to fit all those household chores in around the family’s busy schedule of school, church and athletics.

The Sterlings are, to put it mildly, an exceptionally busy, occasionally loud and exceptionally caring family held close by their faith in God.

Howard is a full-time firefighter paramedic with the South Portland Fire Department and works per diem at the fire station in Gray. He works two 24-hour shifts every eight days in South Portland and another couple of days a week in Gray. That leaves Linda, a part-time teacher and active community volunteer, alone with the children during his long shifts. She embraces that time with her children. And when Howard is home, he is a hands-on dad and the household laundry master.

The couple’s oldest, Hannah, is 13. She, along with 10-year-old twins, Luke and Seth, and 6-year-old Sarah are birth children. Dinah, 10, is adopted, as is Rebekah, 5.

Levi, 9, Noah, 8, and Lydia, 4, are siblings and foster children who are set to be adopted by the Sterlings in September.

Asked how he likes this new family, Levi chants: “We rock. We roll. We’re Sterlings!”

Nine children between the ages of 4 and 13 are a sight that draws attention every time the family leaves the house for a ball game, track practice, an ice cream treat at Gifford’s or a trip to the library. They travel in a 15-passenger van and frequently go camping with their pull-along trailer. On Mondays, when kids eat free at Applebee’s, you might find them dining on a budget.

Home for this family is a massive three-story Victorian with manicured gardens, a baseball diamond on the two-acre property and a weed-choked tennis court that will eventually be paved over to create basketball courts.

“We don’t want them to feel like they missed out on anything because they grew up in a big family,” Linda explained. “It was our choice” to have so many children, and she and Howard both want each child to experience bike rides to the park, team athletics, school clubs and plays, and everything else that makes up childhood.

‘How can I get ‘Sterling’ on the end of my name?’

Howard grew up in a big family and really didn’t want a house full of children when they married, he said. Dinah, their first adopted daughter, changed that.

The Sterlings and their birth children lived in Gray when they met Dinah. The little girl lived across the street with her grandmother and frequently wandered over to visit and play with the Sterling children. “Eventually,” Howard explained, “she was with us all the time.”

“She wanted to be in our family as soon as she met us,” Linda said, and even brought over a photo of herself to prop on a windowsill with photos of the other Sterling children.

Linda remembers one day when Dinah was at their house helping bathe little Sarah. “How can I get ‘Sterling’ on the end of my name?” she asked Linda. Dinah wasn’t yet 3 years old.

That was all it took.

The Department of Health and Human Services, after being contacted by Dinah’s grandmother, approached Linda and Howard about fostering Dinah. The couple moved Dinah in and immediately began the process of becoming official foster parents, which included classes and home visits. It was a big adjustment for everyone, Linda remembers, and especially hard for the twins who were the same age as Dinah – but the family never looked back.

One evening, months after Dinah joined the family, the seven of them were sitting around a dinner table that seats eight and Linda and Howard each thought “we had room at the table, so we decided to foster another child.” The next morning they called DHHS, offered to take another child and had Rebekah three days later.

“I knew I could love her as soon as I saw her,” Linda said, and Rebekah was soon adopted into the family.

It was another tough adjustment because Rebekah had some developmental problems and had trouble showing emotion. She didn’t speak. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t cry. It was five days before she showed any emotion, laughing out loud when Howard reached over and tickled her on the leg. “She let out the funniest laugh,” Howard said, and Linda wasn’t home to hear it. So, he called Linda’s cell, reached over and tickled Rebekah again so Linda could hear her. “It was,” Linda said, “the first sign of a breakthrough.”

Rebekah is very small for her age and still very quiet, but she is making great strides in reaching age-appropriate milestones (and continues to giggle).

As Rebekah settled in, the Sterlings – after a family meeting – decided they might like to foster a sibling group, perhaps two boys to balance the gender mix. Their DHHS caseworker suggested a sibling group of two boys and a girl who had lived in six different homes in their short lives.

The Sterlings said yes and Levi, Noah and Lydia moved right in last fall. They will be adopted in September.

‘God put us on this earth to do this.’

“This is not something we intended” when they first started their family, Linda said, but she and Howard have full faith that “God put us on this earth to do this.”

“It’s not about us,” Linda said, “It’s about the children” and what she and Howard can provide for them emotionally, spiritually, academically and materially. “There are five little kids who didn’t have a home who now have a home,” Linda said.

This family, which encourages their adopted children to select biblical names when they join the family, leans strongly on their faith for support, love and grace.

Members of The Vineyard Church in Lewiston, a congregation of some 1,000 people and growing, Linda teaches classes there, and the children enthusiastically participate in Kids’ Town, a children’s congregation of the larger church. The love and support they receive from their church helps center them, Linda said, and the couple has been helping members of the congregation foster and adopt children who need homes. The Sterlings recognize the good they’ve been able to do and believe others are capable of doing the same.

They’ve earned so much interest among the congregation that DHHS has conducted fostering classes there to make it convenient for interested families, and Linda routinely speaks on behalf of DHHS at various functions about her experience to assure families “if people want to do this, then they can do it.”

“It’s not a scary thing,” Linda said, although the financial commitment can be daunting.

Foster families earn a daily allowance for each child in their care, more for children with special needs. Once foster children are adopted, the allowance goes down slightly, but continues until the child reaches 18. And then, there is a lottery for adopted and foster children to earn full tuition to any of Maine’s public universities that helps make college possible for many of them.

Linda and Howard admit they’re not the norm, but they manage to make ends meet on their respective incomes plus the DHHS allowance, which ranges between $16 and $30 per day per child, to pay their bills, which includes an estimated $150 a week to gas up the family van, up to $400 a week for groceries, fees for summer recreation programs, shoes, clothes, a hefty mortgage, heating their large home and making sure each child has a bicycle.

The most important thing they do, though, is love their children.

“If you can bring kids into a healthy family, they will benefit from that,” Linda said.

DHHS has a limit on the number of children a foster family may have, capping it at six children under 16 years, whether birth, adopted or foster children, so the Sterlings had to earn a waiver to expand their family, which also allows them to foster more if they like. “Our experiences with foster care and adoption have all been positive,” Linda said.

“It can work. It can work with young kids. It can work with older kids. It can work” if families are committed to nurturing children on good days and bad days, no matter what behavior or challenge pops up.

Each night around the dinner table, each family member offers his or her high and low experience of the day. “Everyone has to listen to one another and hear what their days are like, instead of everyone talking at one time,” Howard explained. It’s one way of sharing themselves with one another.

“We are a family,” Linda said, creating a tradition of caring for foster children that she hopes will continue with her own children.

The family’s license plate says it all: RM41MOR. And there certainly appears to be room in this house and in these hearts for one – or more – Sterling.