JoannKB

I don't like Tyler and I know people think he looks like a jerk for talking about Catelynn's weight, but it is a serious health issue for the baby. There are serious pregnancy complications that can be triggered by excessive weight gain and unhealthful nutrition. It's a shame that their healthy eating plan has to be left up to Tyler googling it. Any decent OB/GYN should have provided Catelynn with that information and a full nutrition plan, or at least a referral for a pregnancy nutritionist, which should be covered by insurance if they have decent maternity coverage.

One thing that confused me about the Ryan/Maci fiasco - did she wait 45 minutes before calling him? Ryan was in the wrong, but if you're meeting him to drop off the kid, wouldn't you text or call when he was 5 minutes late to let him know you're there? Or did she try to call earlier and he didn't pick up? It gives me a headache to even watch Ryan on TV; I can't imagine having to share a child with him. As far as the Tyler-goes-to-film-school thing, I have a sense that the only people with a career he has experienced in person are all the MTV folks he's spent the last few years with. He doesn't have any other role models. Some of the producers or cameramen may have mentioned to him that if he can pick up some technical skills they could get him a job. If he were willing to move to a bigger city it probably would be a viable career, becoming a camerman or editor on commercials or videos or something like that.

I was insulted by this as well. Forty year olds don't know how to set up a twitter account, or don't know who Lena Dunham is? My mom, maybe, but not me and not the 40-somethings I know.

I found it kind of sad when Kody was trying to justify why he doesn't spend much time with some of the kids and he said something to the effect of, "Some of them aren't touchy-feely. They don't like cuddling." Is holding a kid in his lap the only way he connects with these kids? If your kid doesn't like to snuggle, then you find what they like to do and spend time with them doing that. With that amount of kids, it would be difficult to try to spend one-on-one time with each of them, even once a month, but it seems like he's given up on even trying.

True, I'm glad she wasn't there, but why wasn't she? Did April & Jackson say that they specifically didn't tell her mom this was happening? Unless they consciously decided to keep the info from April's family it seems odd that her mother and her million sisters weren't there to support her.

Have they said how much time elapses between each round? For those who don't live in LA, are they really going home in between each round, like the interstitial videos make it seem? If so, who is bankrolling all of those airline flights back and forth? The network?

Sharleen (the opera singer from Juan Pablo's season) blogs a lot about the Bachelor and she's said that all meals were always eaten off screen. The Bachelor and the contestants never actually eat together. A producer brings them their meals separately as they get ready for the date. So once they get to the actual dinner date, they've both already eaten, and if they are ever brought food during the date it's usually cold because it's been sitting around, so they don't generally eat during the dates, even if the sole premise of the date is that they are having dinner.

The Lifetime site says that Binyamin's Dad is the CEO of a security company (http://www.directmeasures.com/management-alon.htm) so I am not sure why they had to bleep that when he said it. Maybe they didn't want him advertising his company?

They can only answer a max of 10 questions, and there is a time limit for the round. So if they know they are going to get an answer wrong, it is better to pass to try to get an easier question. If they answer 10 questions, and get 5 wrong / 5 right, they are done with their turn and get a total score of 5. But if they pass on 5 questions, and answer 5 correctly, they get to keep answering new questions to try to improve their score, at least until the time limit is up.

Also, some of them (The picture of Adam/Peter and the picture of Julia/Erika) are so obviously school portraits. They even have that photo studio background effect. I doubt Zeke was taking pictures of his kids up against a backdrop. In theory, I love the idea that they found the old photo rolls that turned out to be the opening credits pics, but it just didn't come off as realistic, the way they shot it.

Yes. I wish Dr. Wexler and also Tori's friends would stop beating around the bush with generic advice like Tori "needs to take care of herself" and she needs to "put herself first." Because Tori is misinterpreting that. She thinks it means making herself the center of attention, and spending more time talking about her feelings and dredging up all of her emotional drama with everyone. They need to give her concrete advice: Eat more. Sleep more. Meditate.

Seeing the sobbing-in-the-therapists-office end of that phone call with the agent made me feel very, very bad for Tori's agent. Can you imagine having to deal with that? It's like trying to manage a toddler.

They called the Peru trip a "service mission" and I don't think that term is exclusive to Mormons. It's very common for teens to take short "service mission" trips, regardless of religion. Many are organized through high schools and completely unconnected to any church. It's a trend that seems to mainly about giving kids some exposure to the wider world, and something to write about for their college application essays. On an unrelated note, is there any family member who is employed somewhere other than the family business? That seems to be a precarious "put all your eggs in one basket" situation.

Totally agree with both these points. I really, really want to like this show, but Ken Marino does not have any chemistry with Casey Wilson. And I am very distracted by the fact that Ken Marino looks exactly the same age as the Dads. I keep waiting for one of the characters to make a comment about the fact that Annie has Daddy issues because she is marrying a man who is the same age as her father(s).

Everyone's mad at how Adam and Kristina acted in re: Dylan & Max, but if all the characters acted perfectly and we loved everything they did, this show would be boring. In the world of charter-schools-started-by-parents (and there are a lot of them in California), I have seen Kristinas and Adams. The way they act, talk, make decisions - it can be awful, but it feels real to me. I know people like this. These people infuriate me when I meet them in real life, but when I see them on this show at least it feels like I am watching humans and that makes me enjoy what Parenthood is doing.

I think a big part of it is her being very conscious of the cameras and trying to construct a story for her show. When she is on camera, she is always acting. Some of the normal people on the show who don't have anything invested in trying to make a good show (i.e., aren't on the cast payroll) are just acting normal, but Tori is incapable of relaxing into normality. She has talked before about trying to create a storyline for her reality shows and she's still doing that here. She's exaggerating everything (and coming off like a cartoon character) because she's acting, and trying too hard to make a "good" show. On a related note, I thought the whole "inviting Mary Jo to a party at our house" thing was very staged for drama. My parents divorced when I was very young (and my Dad ended up marrying the other woman) and there was no reason for them to ever be at a party together, other than my wedding reception. My Mom was never in my Dad's house, and vice versa. They were cordial, and communicated over the phone when they needed to coordinate, but there was no reason for them to socialize in person. Why make drama? Unless you have a reality show, of course.

That was not my interpretation of what she said. Tori was whining about her show being cancelled, and Dr. Wexler said, "But haven't you had more success than most people in this business?" To point out that Tori really has had a bunch of lucky breaks, compared to most struggling actors, and she should have some gratitude.

I don't know why she can't just get a shared Google calendar to coordinate their schedules like normal people. I guess because that's not telegenic enough and Lord knows she needs a storyline for her TV show (or should I say a Stori-line?). It also seemed particularly annoying since they said she did the shopping on the way back from Stella's cheerleading class, when Stella was obviously asleep in the car. So she woke her up to drag her to Staples and buy a ton of crap? Ugh.

Brady, even after 24 kids, apparently gets his medical info from the movies. I thought I heard him say something like, "You know how, in the movies, you always see that pregnant women can't ride horses?" A normal person would have taken a pregnancy test, to confirm if there even was a pregnancy, and then called their doctor to ask about horseback riding, if they were pregnant. But these people are not normal.

I really wish they would have done a series-long arc instead of single episode standalones. The kids don't get a chance to get any real mentoring, and don't get to grow or learn. They're just thrown in over their heads with time constraints that make it too difficult for them to do the challenge and the end products end up looking pretty crappy. If they would keep a group of kids from week to week, at least maybe we could see them get better as they learn from their past mistakes.

The "I don't want to be Spencer Pratt" conversation made me laugh out loud. They really have lost all self-awareness if they think they have kept their reality show classier than the Spencer & Heidi debacle. Yeah, Tori & Dean aren't televising surgeries but at least Spencer & Heidi didn't have any kids that they were exploiting for their own fame addiction. It was also very telling/disturbing that Tori (and her friends) admitted that she's incapable of living a life out of the public eye.

I think the haircut is not doing him any favors, and making him look chubbier than he is. At that age, my kids would go from chubby to thin and back again as they hit growth spurts. They would grow taller for a while and get skinny, then grow wider for a while, then grow taller, etc. Their appetite would increase a lot right before a big growth spurt was about to hit so that tended to make them chubby for a bit until the growth kicked in and their height would catch up with their weight.

I'm not sure why I'm defending them, but I do understand why the little kids would be in preschool. Tori did have a job until recently, and Dean's work is sporadic. It's hard to lock down a good preschool in LA, even if you have money, so you need to get your kids in at as early an age as they will take them, to essentially "save your spot" for when you really need the school. You can't just take your kids in and out of schools as needed when you start working again. I saw this happening a lot when I lived in LA. We had a lot of actor/actress parents who would have their kids in preschool all day even though the parents were at home, because work would come up suddenly, and then they would be gone for a couple of months. And they needed to have the preschool routine already there when that happened.

Although I agree it was not the best choice for Kail to leave her sons with her mother for the night, I felt for her when Javi said that he would not let Lincoln be in the care of anyone except his mother or sister (who live 2 hours away). He is basically denying Kail the chance to have any sort of babysitting help. How is she supposed to go back to college, and work at the same time, when Javi is basically chaining her to the house to take care of Lincoln? Just because Kail's Mom is a crappy babysitter does not mean that they couldn't find a competent, professional babysitter if Javi would allow it. That seems unusually controlling to me.

Combining their tours seems like an extraordinarily stupid financial decision, for a woman who's trying to make a struggling music label financially stable. With her own tour, her label gets all the proceeds. Now co-headlining, she has to share (in what will probably not be an equal split) with Luke and the label he's on. Not to mention what everyone's already mentioned about changing dates and cities for a tour where tickets have probably already been sold.