Just What I'm Thinking...John And Kate Plus Eight

When I was young (and dinosaurs walked the earth) I went to a catholic grade school. I'm not a practicing catholic so I can't attest to how things are handled these days; but back then as far as population was concerned it was a numbers game.

Catholics were not allowed to practice any form of birth control other than the one method guaranteeing parenthood-the rythm method. In my school there were many families that had 5,6, 8 children as a matter of course, there was also a family with 18 children and another with 21 children. At one point the eldest son and daughter from either family was engaged; I wondered what those holiday gatherings were like.

Nowadays, you can watch a program with a set of parents and 8 children called John and Kate Plus 8. This show just brings out the ugly in me. To be fair, I'm not interested in watching endless home movies of people's kids anyway, but something about these people make my skin itch. See, John and Kate had a set of darling girl twins and they felt their family would be complete with one more child, a boy, so they went to a fertility clinic and oops! They hit the baby jackpot and got six more.

The moppets are cute enough but hey, they're just kids. There's not a one of them that plays piano like Mozart, paints like Picasso, or speaks a foreign language; in fact their selling point is that there's so many of them, and they "all have their own little personalities". What do people mean when they say that? Do people think that multiple births would only have one personality that must be split amongst them, so the fact that they all have their own is yet another miracle?

There are many families in America with an abundance of children granted, they weren't all born at the same time, but there's lots of them and, they all have their own personalities.