cmr2014

The skirts drive me crazy. Denim is a heavy fabric, and long skirts made out of old jeans are heavy and hang oddly. It is really easy to make skirts, and if they want to wear long skirts, they could sew them quickly and easily out of nice fabric. Also, their clothes just don't fit, and the skirts are a perfect example. They aren't fitted properly at the waist, and the fabric bunches oddly at the crotch. As a result, the shirts they wear look awful. A good example of this is the Thanksgiving photo of Jill with Derick's family. I know she's pregnant, but this is how all of the girls look. Even if the clothes were nice, they don't fit properly, and hang awkwardly, and they just look rumpled and un-kept. I've said this before, but there are plenty of people who dress modestly and look good. I used to live in NYC and was green with envy over the beautiful merino wool skirts that the Hasidic women wore (not their lifestyle, just the skirts). I do genealogy research and spend a lot of time at Mormon Temples. The people that I meet there are always dressed modestly in clean clothes that fit them properly. Look at a picture of Mitt Romney's family -- you could hardly call them anything but modest in their fashion choices, but the whole family looks clean and attractive. Given her options, though, I think Jana dresses pretty well. There was a scene where Jessa was dressing for a date with Ben. She chose a dress which looked fine, and then pulled on a hideous long, ill-fitting mustard colored cardigan sweater. At least Jana doesn't wear the layers and layers of ill-fitting clothing that her sisters find fashionable.

I thought that they might when I heard about the registries with the requests for hundreds of towels and dozens of sets of linens. I wonder how the leg humpers would feel if they saw the sheets that they purchased off of the registry on one of the howler's beds?

I don't doubt that fitted sheets and duvets are normal in other parts of the world, but I am 100% certain that the Duggars do not do this because they are emulating some European custom. They have traveled all over the world and absorbed exactly zero international culture. I would also virtually guarantee that JB and J'chelle grew up in homes where they went to bed every night in a decent bed with both a top and a bottom sheet, and that they had clean pajamas to wear. Their children, on the other hand, sleep in their clothes, and sleep on the floor, or on a bare mattress. I would bet that they haven't purchased one stick of furniture -- including new beds for their growing children -- since TLC furnished the TTH many years ago. I also doubt that they have purchased any sheets or towels (new or used) in that time. They are simply lazy and slovenly, and have completely checked-out as parents.

Honestly, I don't think that's going to happen. J'chelle has zero interest in children over 6 months old. She may be willing to hold an infant grandchild, but that's it. If there is any babysitting to be done it will, of course, be a J'slave. If Jessa stays on the compound, I can see Jill and Jessa trading babysitting services when there is no J'slave available. I also can't imagine any parent willingly leaving their child in the chaos of the TTH. They both know that Jana, Jinger, and Joy will have their hands full with the howlers and the lost girls, and won't be able to give an infant the attention it requires.

In the picture, both Jana and Joy have shiny healthy-looking hair. I would chalk Jill's scraggly looking hair up to pregnancy, but it really always looks like that, and pregnancy hormones usually make a woman's hair look better. Aside from needing a trim, Jill's hair also needs to be brushed. She just doesn't look clean and well put together to me. I hope that Cathy Bynum will take her out for a nice spa day. She could get her hair washed and trimmed, buy some cute maternity clothes, and perhaps some nice soaps and bath oils.

I have known a number of men (I can think of five off the top of my head) who were married and came out as gay mid-life. They all left behind devastated wives, and very confused children. For some reason they all chose to come out when their own sons were about 13 which made it especially difficult for their children. I'm not saying David is gay -- I have no way of knowing. I do know, however, that it is a BIG DEAL when this happens. I find him extremely unlikable -- despite the plastered-on smile. I think he's very tightly wound, and I also think he's very controlling -- watching him force his young son to kiss his newborn sister by physically positioning him made me really uncomfortable. I also don't think he likes his wife very much -- he may love her, but I don't think he likes her at all, and I'm pretty confident that he doesn't respect her either.

I saw the picture and though that Jana looked fine. I thought that the sweater was cute, and it fit her -- unlike the clothes that so many of them wear. Don't even get me started on the layers of rags that some of her sisters choose to wear.

I wonder if they are living with/near the Seewalds? It was Mike Seewald who was pushing so hard for the marriage, and he may have been willing to help them out with housing, or to give Ben a job. It seems likely that the "job" JB gave Ben doesn't really exist, and was just a storyline for the show -- I don't see JB paying Ben one thin dime if there are no camera crews around. I can't help but think that if they were living in the TTH, or in Mary's old house, JB would have sent the TV cameras over already, and started manufacturing story lines.

Why don't they have family dinners? If they had big family meals with JB carving the roast beast, and the kids passing big bowls down the long table, you know TLC would film it. Of course the idea that the family gathers together around the dinner table in the evening to share the events of the day presupposes that they have been apart during the day. I suppose when the whole gang is just wandering around the TTH all day, there really isn't much to share at dinner-time.

I think that will come later. Right now, both Jill and Jessa are very enamored and I think they each believe that they have the "best" spouse. I would bet, though, on down the road that will crop up. Right now I think that Jill believes she "won" because her husband has done missionary work, and Jessa believes she "won" because she thinks Ben is better looking than Derick. A few years from now, they may be measuring things differently: who has the most kids, the most money, etc. They are all really competitive, so I would bet they do make comparisons (even if they are not saying these things out loud).

Almost 3000, you beat e to it -- I was about to say the same thing. Gothard encourages men to work for themselves, so there is no employer-sponsored insurance. I also doubt that his followers would avail themselves of the provisions of the ACA that would allow them to buy subsidized insurance. If you expect people to have 10-15 kids without insurance, or a steady source of income, midwives and birthing centers are an obvious solution. Plus the midwives are exclusively women, so there is no concern that a man might see a woman's body and be defrauded.

I'm glad Derick's mom is doing well. I find it interesting that her husband is not in this picture. The fact that he is missing in all of the wedding photos and all Duggar-related photos is interesting. Either he really won't take part in the Duggar dog-and-pony show at all, or he is really uncomfortable taking part in the life-events of his wife's adult children. Jill must have gotten her fashion sense from her mother. She's a lovely young woman, but she really does look like an unmade bed all the time. Trimming the hair would be a good start, but she should take someone shopping with her -- maybe Cathy Bynum? There are plenty of cute maternity clothes out there, and I'm sure she gets a discount at Wal-Mart. If she's planning to be pregnant all the time, maternity clothes would be an investment, right? No matter how far she shoves her stomach out, she's only five months pregnant. I'm sure she's excited and wants to show off, but these photos are really ridiculous.

Jesus, what a boring family. It really comes into focus when you set them against cousin Amy. She shows up, and there is real laughter and real fun. Then we get the talking heads of the Duggar girls saying"this is very special," and "we are making memories" in a robotic monotone. The donut cake was a cute idea.

I have to say that I like Amy as a person (perhaps it's because of the comparisons to the Duggars), and I just LOVED the dress shopping. They were silly and fun, and Amy picked a dress that showed her shape and hit above the knee, and and men didn't race into the store and ravish her -- go figure. There was more life in 3 minutes of Amy dress shopping that a whole season of the Duggars. I agree that her voice isn't that strong, and she should try to find herself a career in the music business that doesn't require her to be a lead singer. If she could write songs, she might be able to work a singer/songwriter sort of thing, but she's just not lead singer material -- she doesn't have the chops and she doesn't have the charisma. I wonder what she actually does for a living right now?

Where did this come from? I looked on-line and only saw an urban legend about people dying from roasting hot dogs with oleander branches.

This is a really good point. At this point in time, even the Gothard Board of Directors (or whatever they're called) have had to tacitly acknowledge that Gothard is a predator, and there hasn't been a peep of acknowledgement from the Duggars. They sent their daughters(Jana, at least, I don't know about the others) to JTTH where they would be exposed to this guy, but they are concerned that someone will pretend to be trans-gendered in order to sneak into a women's restroom and molest children. This is the problem with all of their logic related to the LGBT community. No one pretends to be transgender. No one pretends to be gay. It's not fun to be gay (especially in Arkansas), and it's certainly not fun to be transgender. People who are born this way are ridiculed, tormented, bullied, and often outcast by their families and communities. No one would pretend to be transgender in order to molest little girls in a public restroom. There are real things to fear in life -- men and women who struggle with gender identity are pretty far down on my list.

I agree. I don't know that there was ever a discussion between Josh and his aunt, or if that is what J'chelle told him her sister thinks, or if he just made it up out of whole cloth. Still, I have relatives who are on the opposite political side, I don't discuss political issues with their children. It's not appropriate, and there is no situation where I would tell a child (or an adult child) that I think their parents are dim-witted or narrow-minded. The phrasing of the question would also matter. "Do you think gays deserve special rights?" could easily be answered "no" by someone who simply believed that LGBT individuals deserve the same civil rights as other citizens. That would, of course, be interpreted by Josh as his aunt saying she didn't think that gay people should be allowed to marry.

No, they don't. This is the issue with so much of what the Duggars do -- they have no sense of appropriateness or proportionality. Sex between married people is good therefore we get JB and J'chelle dry humping at the putt putt range, and J'chelle's ovulation calendar on the refrigerator. Some skimpy clothes are sexy and suggestive therefore we get the "no shorts" rule and J'chelle covering the shoulders of a four year old to protect her "modesty." Children are a blessing from God therefore we have J'chelle pumping out as many as her uterus can gestate (an encouraging others to do the same) with no concern for what actually happens to those people once they are born.

I think that the petition is counter-productive. People on the far right are well aware that they are losing the culture war on LGBT rights. They also have convinced themselves that they are somehow an oppressed minority -- canceling the Duggar's show over J'chelle's robo-calls is exactly the sort of "oppression" that fuels this belief. I also feel that there is more than a little hypocrisy at play here -- support for gay marriage only recently topped 50%. While support for LGBT individuals is very high among the young (even evangelicals), it's much lower among older Americans. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that more than a few of the signers of this petition have "evolved" on the subject of gay marriage over the last few years. The fact that a family who think that "courting" is a good idea, birth control = infanticide, and women should be under the "protection" of a man at all times is uncomfortable with LGBT rights is hardly news. The Duggars -- and their 19th century beliefs -- will fade from our television screens soon enough, I don't see any advantage in giving them more media exposure.

This little blurb actually made me feel a bit sorry for JD. He really doesn't have a lot to offer in this very superficial courting world. He's not very good looking, and he's not very sociable or well spoken. What girl is going to give him a chance when she knows that just by allowing him to speak to her, she's saying "okay" to marriage. I don't especially like him. I think he's aggressive and unpleasant with a dumb sense of humor. I also think that he doesn't especially like women (not in the sense of being gay, but in the sense of being a run-of-the-mill misogynist). I could be wrong, of course, but if my only options were to walk on by or agree to a courtship and an almost certain marriage, I'd give him a wide berth.

I've posted a few times that I think that Josh and Anna are kind of playing for the cameras and for JB and J'chelle, and are happy with three kids for now. When I watched the exchange between them on this episode, though, I got a different vibe. I still don't think Josh wants any more kids (at least right now), and when he and Anna talk about it in DC, that's the decision. When Anna was around her sister in Chicago, though, she started thinking about how fun it would be to be the center of attention, buy cute baby clothes, etc. and maybe had second thoughts. Josh looked completely over it during Anna's little pregnancy reveal. It could be that he already knew full well, and this was to stop internet rumors, or it could also be that she really did start up again about wanting another baby when Josh thought that they had settled that question.

I think that they could be headed for trouble, and may be cancelled just as abruptly as Honey Boo Boo. When the show first started, they were very careful to state "these are our beliefs, but we respect the rights of others." I had very benign feelings about them for a long time because of that. I thought they were odd, but basically harmless. For whatever reason, they have become much more outspoken in recent years, and are actively inserting themselves into political issues where they are clearly stating, "these are our beliefs, and everyone must live like we do." They have three adult children out in the world who have their own media presence, and social media presence. Michelle appears to be on the cusp of a nervous collapse. Sooner or later, someone is going to say something that will push the whole thing over the edge.

I'm glad that they weren't "called home" because of the kiss pictures as some of us had speculated. While I agree that they would get more out of the trip if they bothered to learn anything about Paris, or France, or anything really, I think they will both get a lot out of it. Unless they just stay in the hotel and have sex -- and that's clearly not the case -- they will learn something. TLC isn't going to film them going from the hotel to McDonalds and back again. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't visit a lot of the tourist attractions: Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, etc. That's a good start. The whole thing has to be pretty eye-popping for Ben, and it's probably fun for Jessa to take a trip without the whole family in tow. And, jacket or no, that is a low cut shirt -- plenty of clavicle there.

I wonder if the extended honeymoon has to do with Benessa living in the shed. The idea is for married couples to have privacy to have "sweet fellowship" often enough to produce a pregnancy. If they're going to be living in the shed, it may be that JB and J'chelle don't see their lives at the compound as providing enough privacy for newlyweds.

I'm sure that's true, and I'm sure that it's a lot different to actually *have* the morning sickness, rather than simply seeing a patient every few weeks who complains of the effects. Not to make light of her pain, but maybe this is God's way of telling her that she doesn't need 19 kids of her own.