Mom, Dad and nine kids juggle school and a business

Who’s ready to do laundry soap?” Richelle Spargur asked enthusiastically, standing near a long plastic table in her kitchen.

“Molly’s still doing school,” her youngest daughter, Emmy, replied.

Indeed, Molly was still working on her math lesson, though she was on the last problem. While she finished, the rest of the children got to work preparing laundry soap kits.

Richelle, her husband Roy, and their nine children all participate in the family business — homemade bath products. Together, the family operates a website, markets the products, ships them to far-flung customers and delivers them to neighbors.

In between, they churn out soap — lots and lots of it.

“If it wasn’t enough having 11 people living in a house, now we’ve got this obstacle course,” Richelle says, navigating across the crowded floor of her bedroom and flinging open a spare closet. The floor is covered with boxes of soap, and stacks of boxes hide the closet’s back wall from view.

The family is gearing up to take its business on the road. This spring, the Spargurs will visit Memphis, Tenn., Cincinnati, Ohio and Greenville, S.C., on the homeschool conference circuit.

The soap business, Virginia Soaps and Scents, produces soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, creams and even deodorant. Every product is handmade in the Spargurs’ kitchen.

The nine children all were homeschooled. Only the three youngest still are in school, but others still live with their parents while in college. The oldest ones maintain careers as a dermatology nurse, a science teacher, an emergency room nurse and even another home-schooling mother.

Even so, everyone helps with the family business. Daughter Ivy, the first paid employee, handles most of the computer and office work. The dermatology nurse helps develop new scents. And the children who still live at home help make soap — when they’re not doing schoolwork.

“Are you having some trouble, Molly?” Richelle asks from the long kitchen table as Molly continues to work at the dining room table. As she talks, Richelle scrapes the edges of logs of soap to remove the marks left by the rubberized molds.

The business requires striking a balance between school and soap. Family and school take priority, Richelle says, but it’s not always easy.

“I think a lot of times I have been totally off the balance beam,” she admits. “The business has been so demanding that it chips away at those priorities.”

But then Richelle recounts something that had happened just a few minutes earlier. She had been explaining to the children how “soap berries,” the fruit of a small shrub, can help clean laundry when dropped in the washing machine.

“Standing and talking to the kids about Indonesia and soap berries — I have to remember, that’s all part of an education,” Richelle says.

Besides, the soap business has never really been about business, she adds. It all started with a school project that was meant to pull the family out of the sorrow that followed a tragedy.

Eldest daughter Heather’s first daughter, Elizabeth, was born with a severe heart defect, Richelle said. Elizabeth lived until she was 10 months old.

After Elizabeth’s death, Richelle said, the entire family was thrown into a crippling depression.

“I didn’t know where the kids were in school, and I really didn’t care,” Richelle admits.

Finally, after months of the daily devastation, Richelle decided to do a unit in school about colonial life. She hoped the interesting topic would help them all recover.

After learning that early settlers made their own soap, the children wanted to try making soap, as well.

Richelle, who has a chemistry degree, began compiling the ingredients — palm, coconut, soy and castor oils.

“It started to reawaken the old days in the lab,” she said.

While Richelle mixed the lavender-scented soap concoction, they realized they had no purple coloring. On a whim, Roy began grating a purple crayon into the mixture while Richelle stirred.

Suddenly, the brew began turning yellow, then brown. Soon, it resembled fancy brown mustard. The family gave up on turning the soap purple and set it out to dry.

But before they went to bed that night, the children couldn’t resist taking a peek. Under the towel, the soap had turned a brilliant purple hue. The entire family roared with laughter.

“It was the first time we had done anything fun in so many months,” Richelle said. “It was just about kind of healing and pulling the family together.”

The purple-soap incident sparked the family’s initiative. Before long, there was so much homemade soap piled in the house that daughter Heidi couldn’t get to the light switch in her room.

“I have an idea for another unit study,” Richelle recalls her husband suggesting. “How about marketing?”

That’s when a hobby turned into a business. But Richelle sees it more as a ministry.

“It’s more about people and relating than it is about business,” she said. “It’s given us kind of a platform to give back to this community.”

For the homeschooled children, it seems, the balance is easy.

“We just do school in the mornings and come down and help mom with the soap business,” daughter Emmy said. “It doesn’t take us that long to do school.”

Richelle says homeschooled children do not take as long to do their lessons as those in a traditional school, because dead time is eliminated, and children are motivated to finish their work more quickly.

“High school should not take more than four hours a day,” Richelle said. “That’s when running a home-based business with homeschool works extremely well. It is to their benefit to work quickly and accurately.”

Of course, there are days when the children don’t feel like making soap, so they pace themselves in their schoolwork to put it off. But Roy and Richelle make sure the children feel like owners in the process, even offering certain children the chance to buy the parents out of parts of the business.

“They have individual lives to lead,” Richelle said. “We’ve been very blessed in that all of them are taking part.”

While the family travels to market its soap — proceeds from the business pay for all travel expenses — the children sometimes get days off from school and sometimes work on the road. It all evens out in the end, Richelle said.

“We have continued to grow,” she said of the business and her family. “I’ve been really impressed with them.”