"It takes a village to raise a child." We've all heard it, and if you're a parent, you live it. Lately, I've been feeling more like I've upgraded to a city, maybe even a metropolis. It's a fact of life that once you have more than two children, you are outnumbered, and it is mathematically impossible to have all of your children where they need to be at the same time and keep your sanity intact.

Now, you may try to cite an example where two of your children are twins, and you might think it could work out for you, but I guarantee that one of the twins will want to be in figure skating and the other will want to be in table tennis, and the only places that offer either of them will only have classes on the same night, at the same time, in towns 50 miles away from each other, so don't think the twin thing is going to work out for you either. Even when you have three children in the same sport, their age differences will guarantee schedule conflict. But, I digress.My city is invaluable to me. Between all of us, keeping track of the minutiae of several dozen kids isn't so bad. I can always count on one of my fellow villagers to remember what I'm forgetting or to know the answer to a critical question. For example, my friend J got the text, "where do you get glitter hair spray?" and answered it with, "I pass right by there on the way home, I'll pick some up for you!"And she did. In fact, she got gold spray AND silver spray. And, I'm eternally grateful. J also knows that I had to hide it away to avoid having my entire house hair spray painted with glitter, so I hope she remembers where I hid it.The village tends to grow in one of two ways. First of all, you already know crazy people and you all decide to join the same fun activity together. That's the easy way to create a village. The second way is to grow one. If you stick with a sport, or a dance class, or a concert band for long enough, you tend to wind up with the people who are just as die-hard about lugging their kids places as you are.You can recognize the crazy by the amount of snack food on the floor of their car and how many changes of clothing their kids have in the back seat. I really think those team sport magnets were developed by parents who just wanted to easily track who else they could hit up for a car pool.Once you've started your tribe at, oh, say, soccer practice, and you get your car pools and your schedules synced, it seems like a good idea to convince these people to join the other activities that your own pack is in. This leads to a combined tribe that crosses many activities and age groups. These are the people who know your children and their schedules just about as well as you do and that you know will do a stellar job of keeping your children in line and that you trust to run them to the emergency room, if needed.Although you will feel really, really badly about the inconvenience of it all and you will probably buy them a nice bottle of wine to make up for it.Recently, I had the opportunity to test the strength of my tribe. Remember middle school health class? Where you and a partner had to care for an egg as if it were your child? Well, this story involves 11 dozen eggs. Our team hosted our league championship swim meet this week, and as any of you who have been involved in youth sports know, this meant a great opportunity for our team to fundraise through our concession stand.We started by soliciting donations from local businesses, one of which included several dozen eggs, which were delivered to a coach's home. Our amazing booster club decided that they would make breakfast sandwiches for the early morning meet, but that involved getting the eggs to another team mom, who bravely volunteered for the task.The coach who had the eggs was not the coach who was running practice that evening, so the first of several handoffs came to me. Unfortunately, before I ran my later swim practice, I had to run a soccer practice, so I was not going directly to the swimming pool and I did not want to chance driving around with 11 dozen eggs and bags of soccer equipment in my car that had to sit in the hot sun for an hour and a half. Enter the Wonderful Husband who ended up delivering not only 11 dozen eggs to the swimming pool, but two children and their swim bags, too. Here, he handed the eggs off to the coach who was running practice, who then handed them off again to the parent who was running the car pool for the evening, who also happened to be an Awesome Husband.After practice, that Awesome Husband loaded his own car full of kids, all their swim bags, and 11 dozen eggs, and headed to the home of the team mom who was ultimately in charge of cooking all the eggs for the meet.I'm happy to report that all of the eggs survived, we all passed the egg test, and we are fit to be parents! This is good news, since we've been at the job for a few years now!Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.