Allison Eddyblouin enjoys some quality time with her first grandchild, Charity Ann Parr, the daughter of Eddyblouin’s second child, Thalia and her husband, Josh Parr. The Parrs are preparing to welcome their second child in November and adopt Thalia’s second cousin, who is due in October. “We are going to go from one grandchild to three grandchildren within a year,” Allison Eddyblouin said. “It’s going to be fantastic.” (Courtesy photo)
It might surprise some people, but Allison Eddyblouin was not born into the Catholic Church. Her mother was Catholic, but her father was Episcopalian. It was through her mother’s family that Eddyblouin grew up adjacent to the faith. She converted when she was 23.
It might be a surprise because to casual observers, the Eddyblouin family, of Bristol, is sometimes held up as an example of a “good Catholic family.” Regular supplicants at St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Newcastle, John and Allison Eddyblouin have devoted themselves to family and faith and raised their seven children in the church.
While John generated income working outside the home to support the family, Allison stayed home to care for and homeschool the children.
Because the Eddyblouins are an unusually large family for contemporary America, they have attracted attention in public, especially when the children were younger, Allison Eddyblouin said. However, she shrugged off any preconceived notions people might have. Only God is perfection, she said. All others have to strive for it.
“If somebody perceives me in a way that I think is a little bit too holy, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I conceived my first child out of wedlock,’” she said. “So let’s just throw that out there.”
Born in Canada, Allison Eddybrown moved around a bit as a child but spent a good portion of her early years growing up in Toronto. She came to the U.S. to stay when she matriculated to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. There she met her future husband, John Blouin, when both were working as laboratory assistants.
“He was up in the lab on the second floor, chatting with another lab assistant and going through, ‘Who are the lab assistants?’” Allison Eddyblouin said. “Well, I guess they all heard the door open; this big, loud, creaky door open and shut, and then apparently my exuberant laugh, just echoed up the stairwell and down the hallway. The other student said, ‘And that would be Miss Eddybrown.’ So my laugh preceded me.”
The attraction was immediate and grew over the course of their time working together. John was a year ahead of his future bride and Allison was expecting when they married in 1995, a day or two before John’s college graduation.
“John and I were definitely encouraged by the fact that we had conceived our baby before we got married,” Allison Eddyblouin said. “People have a funny perception of a Catholic woman who has seven kids and who has stayed home and homeschooled them. Sometimes I like to sort of shake things up by being like, ‘Yeah, I actually do drop the f-bomb.’”
The couple decided to combine their last names to create a shared surname for their new family unit.
“I wanted to keep the Eddy and drop the brown and he was Blouin and he wanted the whole family to have the same last name, so we combined it to Eddyblouin,” Allison Eddyblouin said.
During Allison’s senior year, the Eddyblouins lived in New Mexico while Allison attended class on St John’s Santa Fe campus and John worked on the HIV database at Los Alamos National Labs in Los Alamos. At the time, John had thoughts about going into wooden boat building and he wanted to be closer to his family in Connecticut.
While reading an issue of Wooden Boat magazine, John Eddyblouin found a feature about The Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Bristol. Not long afterward, the Eddyblouins came to Maine to inspect boat building schools. Deciding on Carpenter’s Boat Shop, the family moved to Lincoln County in August 1997.
“We just landed into three, and soon to be four, amazing communities,” Allison Eddyblouin said. “Carpenter’s Boat Shop with Bobby and Ruth (Ives), the Catholic Church, obviously; and La Leche League. I had just become a La Leche League leader and I made contact with Kate Pennington, and it was just so perfect.”
In an increasingly rare sight, all nine members of the Eddyblouin family convene while in Connecticut in February for the funeral of the children’s grandfather, Charlie Blouin. Front row, from left: John and Allison Eddyblouin. Middle row, from left: Sister John Henry, Agnes, Thalia Parr, John Henry, and Blaise Eddyblouin. Back row, from left: Arveragus and Thadeus Eddyblouin. (Courtesy photo)
Eddyblouin went on to volunteer for the La Leche League of Maine and New Hampshire for the next 20 years. A national organization represented by state and regional chapters, La Leche League offers support to new parents who want to breastfeed or otherwise provide human milk to their child. During her tenure, Eddyblouin helped organize conferences, trained other women to be league leaders, and held meetings locally wherever she could find the space to do so.
Expectant parents often spend a lot of time preparing for childbirth but often overlook breastfeeding, Eddyblouin said. It may be a natural process, but it is not necessarily intuitive.
“It can be more difficult than the birth process,” she said. “Not that there’s necessarily a lot you can do to prepare for breastfeeding, but seeing other women breastfeed is an important part of preparing to breastfeed. It can be much more difficult than giving birth, because it’s an ongoing relationship.”
At the same time, the Eddyblouins were growing their own family, welcoming Mary Catherine’s siblings Thalia, John Henry, Thaddeus, Arveragus, Blaise, and Agnes between 1999 and 2012.
In 2020, Mary Catherine took her vows and joined the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. She is now known as Sister John Henry.
With the sole exception of Mary Catherine, six of the seven Eddyblouin offspring were born at home. Eddyblouin called the home birth experience “amazing” and said it was the right decision for herself and her husband. Allison Eddyblouin said she had full confidence with the midwife she chose to help her, Dolores Carboneau. Any concerns John Eddyblouin might have had were allayed after meeting Carboneau.
“John had concerns at the beginning, but then we had this first meeting with Dolores just to talk to her, and from that moment on, John has been the strongest advocate for home birth that you could know,” Allison Eddyblouin said. “He is like ‘She clearly knows what she’s doing and loves what she’s doing, and is so educated about the needs of pregnant and birthing women, so there are just no concerns.’”
By 2002 the Eddyblouins had saved enough money to buy some land and an 800-square-foot house on Poor Farm Road in Bristol, paying in cash. Thrifty and resourceful, the Eddyblouins didn’t take out a mortgage until 2010 when they needed to make room for their growing family.
Allison (left) and Agnes Eddyblouin share a moment outside the family home on Poor Farm Road in Bristol as dog Golda keeps watch. Thrifty and resourceful, John and Allison Eddyblouin paid cash for the property in 2002. (Sherwood Olin photo)
“Agnes was born in the living room, but then I went upstairs, and we have our master suite with the bathroom in the bedroom, and I had a phone with an intercom,” Eddyblouin said. “I was just six days upstairs, like, ‘Bring me food.’ It was great.”
After more than 20 years working at home, Allison Eddyblouin began easing back into the workforce in 2021. She was already teaching Latin to her children. When the Damariscotta Montessori School needed a Latin teacher for the 2021-2022 school year, she began teaching afternoon classes there twice a week. The following September, just after the school year began, she received a call from a friend: St John’s Catholic School in Brunswick needed a middle school Latin teacher.
“That was a Sunday night when I got the phone call,” Eddyblouin said. “On Wednesday, I shadowed the job and I was teaching on Friday.”
She took the job informing school administrators she was pursuing her master’s degree and wanted to work in health care. She eventually took a position with MaineHealth in Brunswick and earned her master’s in health care administration from St. Joseph’s College in Standish in May.
Eddyblouin said hers is an entry-level position, which is what she wanted, and it requires multi-tasking, advanced communication skills, and helps people in need. Like any job, some days are better than others but she works with a great team and enjoys what she does, she said.
“It’s answering phones, scheduling appointments, doing check in, check out; just very relational, but also interacting with providers that I’m scheduling for,” she said “I just love all of it. I love helping people get things done that they need done.”
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