The Morning After: The Numbers

Yeah, that's a lot of kids, but my great-grandparents raised about that many kids, on a farm deep in the Appalachian mountains, and kept them all in food and clothes and raised them all to be good, honest, hardworking people (real americans? possibly!). So I have tons of extended family from my grandma's generation still living, and have a big appreciation for how awesome a big family can be. However, short of having a functional farm for the whole family to work, its hard to imagine anyone other than Bill Gates having the resources to raise that many kids. And looking at how much energy goes into just raising ONE or TWO kids, I don't see how my great-grandma did it. They say that the older kids often had the keeping of the weans, which makes sense, and that everyone worked the land together, but still it does blow my mind to think about the practical and logistical implications of that large a family. My goal had always been to have several kids (still childless), but with us being totally poor (both me and my husband have jobs with struggling nonprofit organizations) and not being anywhere close to self-sufficient, I just don't see how it would be possible (and by "possible" I mean "not having DCS take them all away"). Anyway, mad props and maximum respect to parents of huge families.

i have one kid, and i love her, but by god, there is no amount of free stuff in the world that could induce me to have another. 8 or 17 - might as well be infinity from where I look - an impossibly large number to hold in my brain.

an aside: is it just me or does the girl standing next to her dad look like she's not so happy to be in that picture? contrary to her dad, who looks SUPA happy.

@crystalsuelindell: I would imagine that it is unbelievably hard to get all those kids to smile at the same time. My mom often tried (and failed) to get pictures of me and my sister smiling together, and there were just the two of us! But yeah, she does look bummed out, or at least distracted.

So my wife watches this show with a mixture of admiration and horror. For me it's all horror. The admiration is for the job they do raising 8 kids and horror for the fact that after conceiving twins while using fertility drugs they took the plunge again and scored sextuplets. That and the fact that Kate is just mean. She's mean to her children, to her husband, to the crew, to the unfortunate people who help her, etc. It's also been interesting to watch as they and their children have evolved into television personalities. In the first couple of seasons, Kate was much more motherly/homely. Currently she is over the top glam. Poor Jon started going bald, tried out a wicked comb-over, and I guess at some point he got plugs or something. (It was alluded to in a commercial, but I never saw the episode.) My wife has become disillusioned with Kate over the years. Every few episodes or so, Kate will make some reference to the neighbor who comes and does her laundry, or her ironing, or makes meals, and so on and so on. Add to that what James about people throwing goods and services at them, and it seems as though the parents do little work other than being TV personalities. Also, all the current episodes seem to revolve around them taking their kids on special trips in their hideous van.

@crystalsuelindell: It's not just you, the twins are very angry.