Gays Dads From Phoenix Raise 12 Adopted Children
Steve and Roger Ham have fostered many children.
May 19, 2011 — -- TV's "Brady Bunch" had six kids, but Steve Ham and his partner, Roger Ham, make the Bradys look like amateurs. The Phoenix men are raising 12 adopted children and they don't think they're doing anything extraordinary.
"We just happen to be two gay men who adopted twelve children … It's not amazing to us – it's just our life," said Steve.
"Family is love," he continued.
"Good Morning America" visited the Ham family one Sunday and witnessed that love firsthand.
Breakfast was prepared with military precision: sausage, bacon, pancakes. It was a mountain of food for a small army of energetic children.
Sunday is a day of rest, but you wouldn't know it from all the arm-wrestling, nail cutting, basketball-playing and rope swinging that took place.
How It All Began
The couple's 3,000-square-foot house used to seem spacious, but now every room houses their children – not to mention their pets: a parrot, fish and several dogs.
Their extraordinary journey started with one child: Michael.
"I twisted Roger's arm to get one child," Steve said on "GMA" today. "We went through process of adoption in the state of Arizona and it just escalated from that point."
Michael was just 5 years old when Roger and Steve got him from foster care.
"We met Michael and Michael just happened to have 5 siblings," Steve said.
So Roger and Steve worked to reunite Michael -- now 13 -- with his siblings. Soon, Vanessa, Elizabeth, Jackson, Madison and Andrew joined the clan.
"Once we had six, it was like, what's one more? And then, what's two more?" Roger said, describing how their family grew.
Over the years, they added Logan and Isabel, Cooper and Olivia, Marcus and Ambrose, while Child Protective Services (CPS) in Arizona continued to bring the welcoming couple more and more kids.
"We had over 32 foster kids that came in and out of our house," Roger told "GMA." "They'd call us in the middle of the night and bring us a kid."
They stopped at an even dozen.
"We are trying to build a tight knit family," Steve said. "These guys will have each other the rest of their lives."
"They may not be biological siblings, but in their hearts they all know they are siblings … to me, that's amazing," he added.
After breakfast, the family goes to church, then to McDonald's for lunch, after which there is an afternoon swim.
Even in the middle of all the fun, there are little pockets of drama: Andrew has a fever, Elizabeth is unhappy because she is on dog clean-up duty for the day and Cooper appears to have a stomach ache.
Their exhausting day ends with bath time. The little ones line up and wait their turn, and then they're all off to bed.
But the day doesn't end for Steve and Roger who must plan ahead for the next morning, the next day, the next week and so on.
The hardest part of raising 12 kids?
"Scheduling," Steve said.