When I started my parenting journey, I did not realize I would have five children. Three was the “reasonable” number we’d decided on when we had that first conversation about our married futures and what our family might look like someday.

I don’t really know what happened. We changed our minds. We were surprised (at least by the extra twin). We were…a little crazy, maybe?

I didn’t expect so many children to call me Mama.

But what I really didn’t expect was for all of them to be boys.

When the sonogram proved the first one was a boy, I remember thinking, “I don’t even know what to do with boys. I won’t be able to fix their hair or play with dolls or read girly stories like Anne of Green Gables or The Little Princess or Little House on the Prairie.” I, once the official French braider for my high school volleyball team, was good at that stuff.

I remember thinking, “I don’t know if I’ll be any good at boys.”

Now, seven years later, with five of them destroying my house on a minute-by-minute basis, I have no idea what I would even do with a girl.

But even still, there are some elusive mysteries about this so-different gender that confound me to this day.

I thought I might celebrate my boys by sharing some. (Note: Some of them might be cross-gender, but I just wouldn’t know.)

Stripping off clothes as soon as they walk through the door. They’re not allowed outside without clothes or only in their underwear, but that’s OK. They’ll just play inside in their underwear, or with nothing on at all, even though it’s a perfect afternoon for riding scooters or swinging or running laps around the cul-de-sac. They just want to be where they can wear the fewest clothes.

Leaving stripped clothes on the floor, no matter how many times I remind them where the laundry hamper is. Even though the shoes have an easy, designated place. Even though they know perfectly well how to hang shirts and fold shorts. Even though the hamper is two inches from where they dropped their discarded clothes.

Shoes worn out three weeks after I bought them. They run too fast or kick poles with friends at recess or use their toes as a scooter brake, even though there’s a perfectly efficient one attached to the back of their scooter.

Hysterical laughter anytime someone farts or pretends to. It never, ever, ever gets old. To them.

Pride in owning up to the fart, especially if it’s smelly. Even the 2-year-old twins are now saying “I tooted” and grinning about it. Apparently this is something to be immensely proud of.

Everything is a competition. Running down the stairs. Setting the table. Talking.

So.much.noise. We had to buy a megaphone just to be heard over the constant noise, because we were damaging our vocal chords just trying to yell instructions over the five competing voices that are somehow 20 times louder than ours.

Death-defying acts. Like jumping from the ninth stair onto the bottom floor of our house. Like swinging as high as they can possibly swing and then jumping from the height to see if they’ll land on their feet. Like hanging upside down from monkey bars I can’t even reach from the ground, while I stand “spotting” them, unsure of what I’ll do if their legs slip and they come bowling toward me.

Story times that don’t look like your average story times, because boys are standing on their heads and sitting on a tower of pillows, trying not to fall, and jumping from one couch to another. But they’re listening, somehow. I know. I’ve tested them just to be sure.

Total obsession with their boy-parts. “Stop playing with your penis.” I say this several times a day.

Butter knives snuck from the drawer for a quick sword-fighting match while I take a five-minute break in the bathroom upstairs.

Everything becomes a weapon. An empty paper towel roll, dug out of the recycling basket = a sword. A PVC pipe that’s supposed to be holding up the soccer net out back = a bazooka (they don’t even know what that is. They just shoot.) A scooter = a machine for smashing slower brothers’ toes.

Wet dog smell when they come back in from outside, even if it’s 40 degrees out there.

Bath time where soap misses the front of the hair and face, even though I’m right there to remind them. “I don’t care if I smell,” they say. Well, okay then.

No underwear in their drawers just three days after I’ve done laundry because they spent the last three days playing Captain Underpants and actually, for once, put all the underpants worn on their head in the laundry basket.

Nakedness. All the time. Everywhere. Company’s over? No matter. They’ll come of the bathroom naked anyway. Immediately after bath time, it takes at least five reminders for each of them to even locate their pajamas (in the same drawer they’re always in) and five more for them to actually put them on. I’m pretty sure this is just a 20-minute stalling technique meticulously planned to get them more naked time.

This is not an exhaustive list of all their wild and crazy, by any means.

But with all the nose-wrinkling smells and the heart-stopping tricks and the mess that follows them like Charlie Brown’s “Pig Pen,” there sure is a lot of love for their mama.

They love like little hurricanes, pulling up the roots of scars I’ve carried my whole life, smashing windows and walls so I’m brave enough to bare the very heart of me, tearing off a roof and twisting me toward a height I could never imagine.

I did not expect this, either.

What these years with boys have shown me is that I am a woman beloved times five.

And I wouldn’t trade that for an impeccably tidy house that smells nice all the time or a heart that beats calm or children who sit perfectly still and quiet at just a word or look from me.

I wouldn’t trade it for all the riches in the world, because I already have those riches, climbing across tables and hanging from ceiling fans and flipping off the used-to-look-nice couches in my home.

Riches beyond compare.

Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.