Spectacles. Eyeglasses. Bifocals. Trifocals. No matter what you call them, glasses are glasses, and I have to wear them.

Hello. I'm Mallory Pike. I'm eleven. Apart from the glasses, this is the thing you need to know about me: I have seven younger brothers and sisters. That's right, seven. And three of them are triplets, identical boys. If you think it's easy to blend in when you come from an eight-kid family, wear glasses, and furthermore are the only one you know with a head of curly hair, you're wrong.

The triplets are ten years old. Their names areAdam,Jordan , and Byron. Occasionally, they make me crazy, but mostly they're all right. The good thing about triplets is that they always have each other. Built-in friends.

The next kid in my family is Vanessa. Vanessa is nine and hopes to become a poet. Sometimes she goes around for days on end

speaking in rhyme. Talk about making me crazy. But Vanessa is all right, too, and in a lot of ways we're very much alike.

My eight-year-old brother is Nicky. I feel kind of sorry for Nicky because he has trouble making a place for himself in our family. He wants to play with the triplets most of the time, since they're boys, but the triplets think Nicky is a baby. That leaves Nicky with us girls, and Nicky is going through this phase where he hates girls.

Margo is seven. She's going through a bossy phase, even though she's almost the youngest in the family. She bosses everyone and everything, even my parents, her dolls, and Pow, this dog that lives down the street. It's always "Do this," and "Do that." Mostly, we ignore her. I mean we ignore the bossiness, not Margo herself.

Last in our family is Claire. Claire is five. I guess being the baby in a big family isn't always easy, but you'd think she wouldn't exactly need to draw attention to herself. That's just what Claire does, though, by being extremely silly. Over the summer, she started calling our parents Moozie and Daggles instead of Mommy and Daddy, and she attaches "silly-billy-goo-goo" to people's names. Like, if she wants a drink, she'll say, "Can I have some