The following year they had their first child. This week they had their tenth.

With his eyes barely open, five-day-old Charlie fulfilled Tania’s plan to have 10 kids before she turns 40 next month. 

“All I ever wanted to do was have kids. Right through my school, with career options I just wanted to be a mum and my husband wanted to be a dad,” Tania said.

Their Warrnambool home now contains seven boys and three girls. The eldest is 20 and the others are separated by gaps no more than three years. In the Martini household you’ll find multiples of everything — eight Xbox controllers and three or four TVs in the living room. 

At one point two washing machines churned out clean school uniforms. 

The only thing you won’t find is silence — and that’s the how the parents like it.

“It’s never boring. It’s always fun and they all work together and they all help, they all understand the concept of family and pitching in,” Tania said. 

There are other clans with 10 kids around the region and they swap tips. 

But few homes would have a dinner table as busy as theirs. 

“They all live here but Jayden (18) works three nights a week at dinner times so he misses out. But we have a lot of meals together,” she said. There’s also a simple answer to transporting everyone to kindergarten, primary and high school - we have a minibus," Tania said.

“We had to get a truck licence when we had number seven so we took our newborn baby, we sat in the dual cab of a truck and we got our truck licence in Hamilton.” 

As for her husband, Jason said: “When I was asked ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ it was ‘I want to be a dad’, but I never expected to have this many.”

Even with little Charlie making it an even 10 , the couple are not ruling out more children.

“We’ve said we were going to stop at a few different numbers but we haven’t,” Tania said. 

“We just love our kids.”