What Was It Like Raising Five Gronks? It Sounds Like Insanity

Are you a dad who feels overwhelmed by growing boys destroying your house, your yard & every plate of food put in front of them? Try to remain calm like Gordy Gronkowski, the dad who fathered five maniacs who drove him nuts until he was able to drive them out of his house and into the world to do things like win Super Bowls and feed themselves.

Writer Chris Jones spent Super Bowl Sunday reminiscing about the time he spent profiling Gordy and his huge boys -- Dan, Gordie Jr., Glenn, Chris and Rob -- way back in 2014, but the results of that profile are still mesmerizing to those of us who have little kids.

It's like therapy to hear Gordy tell Jones the war stories and how everything eventually worked out, but it took the ingenuity of Gordy and the boys' mother, Diane to make it through the growing stages.

Steps taken by Gordy and Diane to survive:

• Build the family house with double-width hallways

• Extra-tall doors and huge rooms

• Each boy had a king-size bed

• One massive room held three king-size beds

• The boys slept wherever they crashed

• The backyard had a baseball field

• Tennis court

• Basketball court

• Pool

• Hot tub

• The basement had a massive gym loaded with weights, since Gordy ran a bunch of gyms

• Two full-size refrigerators and freezers

• Twenty gallons of milk per week

What was it like for Mom to raise those animals? She told the Tampa Bay Times before Super Bowl LV that, as you'd expect, it wasn't easy.

"It was a lot of work raising them," Diane told the Times. "But I wasn't raising them in any specific way. They love sports. They all did hockey, football, basketball, baseball. They went snow skiing. They went waterskiing. They played tennis. They swam. They played golf. So pretty much whatever anybody wanted to do, it's like, 'Okay, we'll go do it.'"

It's refreshing to see there is light at the end of the tunnel. Take it from the Gronks. One day, you'll set those wild beasts free and there will be some peace and quiet. By then, you might start to miss the chaos.