There's Another Duggar On The Way!

Big surprise announcement on the Today show this week: the Duggars are expecting child #19. Hey, Jim Bob, maybe it’s time to get a hobby. And, Mrs. Jim Bob, once in a while you can just say no! I mean, come on, 18 kids weren’t enough? Can you even remember all their names? I only had three boys and I got their names mixed up all the time. I still get confused. Every phone call starts with me trying to guess which one is on the other end of the line. James? Peter? Paul? Which one are you? I even get the facts of their antics blurred from time to time. Which one of you burned a hole in the sheets playing with matches? I can’t remember. I do remember the night two of my boys had one of those “high-low” stomach viruses and I slept on the floor outside the bathroom door with one child on each side of me and a puke bucket balanced on my chest, just in case they couldn’t make the three foot crawl to the toilet bowl. How the hell can you do that with 19 kids? How can you run through the house with a thermometer checking fevers all night long? Or keep track of medications and doses for all of them?

I don’t buy it: the posed photos with the children all smiling, some holding musical instruments, as if the photographer interrupted their practice session. Others are holding younger siblings, all of them smiling – even Jim Bob and the Mrs. have frozen smiles on their faces. Are these people real, or has Sesame Street made some gosh darn amazingly lifelike puppets? Were those strings I saw above Jim Bob’s head?

I did some figuring. I averaged time throughout the day that it took to take care of personal hygiene, cook meals, home school the children, pick up the house, do laundry, empty the trash and sleep a minimum of 6 hours. I figure, on a good day, Michelle Duggar must only have about 20 minutes left to spend with Jim Bob at the end of the day. If you already had 18 kids and you only had 20 minutes to spend with your husband at the end of the day, would you spend that time trying to make another child? I think I would do something more creative and fun. I would invent games like, “Let’s see if I can tie you up, honey.” Then I would string him up from the ceiling joists, and leave him there suspended in mid air, like Tinkerbell, so I could get a solid uninterrupted 6 hours sleep. Let’s see if he’s still smiling in the morning when we lower him down for the photo op.