Family of cheetahs

When I look at this picture, I have two reactions. First, I smile, but then I think what a burden this mother has. Five mouths to feed is constantly stressful. I shot this with a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto, and that meant depth of field was quite shallow. As I watched the family of cheetahs through the viewfinder, I waited and hoped the cubs would spread out on the same plane as the mother. They would then be approximately equidistant to the camera, thus my relatively large lens aperture would be enough to maintain focus on all the cats. If even one of the cubs weren't sharp, for me that would ruin the picture. My settings for this sunrise image were 1/640, f/6.3, and 200 ISO. I habitually turn off image stabilization when photographing wildlife assuming my shutter speeds are fast. It doesn't make the images any sharper, and it unnecessarily drains the battery.