mynextmistake

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn this has been in the works for a while, and that’s why they chose to purchase a home in this area. I remember right after they bought their home some people were commenting that it was in kind of a weird location for them to pick. If they’d already decided on public school, they probably looked at school quality when choosing a community to move into. Well, he’s going to try. Those jobs aren’t as easy to get as people like Derick think.

Wow, this is amazing. Kudos to Jill and Derick for making the best decision for their child.

Mommy #M6? Is she a locker at Port Authority?

Agreed.

Thank you for this. I had a crash C-section for fetal distress. Mini Mistake came out with an APGAR of 4 (for reference, they frequently intubate babies born at 3 or below). When I asked my doctor what would’ve happened if we had waited, he looked me straight in the eye and said “she probably would’ve died.“ Shame Jill for being a bad Christian, for having a douche of a husband, for being intellectually incurious, for being a terrible midwife, for never styling her hair, or for any number of other things. But C-section shaming? Fuck that shit. Fuck that shit all the way to hell. Because at the end of the day, C-sections are the reason I go home to a live preschooler instead of pictures of a dead baby, and anyone who has a problem with that can see me in the street. C-section shaming. Why the fuck are we so awful to women in this country? What’s wrong with us?

DUI? Solicitation?

Eyeliner is one of the few cosmetics i’ve found where the quality of the product makes a huge difference. Lipstick is the other. Everything else is made to be blended so you don’t need a lot of precision. With mascara, which is the other exception to this rule, there seem to be formulations in all price points which work decently, but i’ve never found a cheap eyeliner that works well. I know Jill drops a lot of dollars on shit like this for someone whose kids are starving, but i’m guessing she’s not spending enough to keep her and 3 teenagers in Lancôme, either. I suspect she uses a drugstore brand and the thick lines and clumps just kind of go with the territory. It doesn’t help that she apparently uses two or three coats of everything.

Yes, but to be fair Jeremy isn’t trying to move into someone’s house while they are still living in it. Basically Jeremy is a freeloader and Jill is a home invasion robber.

So the Kellers aren’t just *letting* Nathan marry Nurie, they seem to be actively working (and spending!) to make the match happen. I’ve been thinking about why they are planning to willingly and seemingly happily hitch their wagon to the Rodrigues circus of crazy and the only thing that makes sense is that they’re desperate to get Nathan married off and don’t think he could find a better match. But why? His family is poor and he’s butt ugly, but the Kellers are fundie royalty, which I would think would count for something. They have already lost three children to lives outside the cult, so maybe they’re concerned that if they marry him to anyone more “liberal” (like a girl who went to college or wears pants) he might follow suit. The Rodrigueses have a lot of flaws, but they’re certainly indoctrinated enough for the Kellers to not worry that Nurie will lead Nathan down the fundie-light path. Or maybe Nathan isn’t into girls or sex and the Kellers realize that Nurie is unlikely to complain about that as long as he knocks her up once in a while and she doesn’t have to go home to Jill and the room of 1000 bunk beds. It’s a puzzler.

I wonder if Nurie and Nathan will go with all N names for their eleventy-billion children. They seem like the type that would go for a gimmicky naming convention like that. N would be one of the harder letters to get a lot of names out of, though. For girls you could have Naomi, Natasha, Natalie, Nancy, Nell, Nicole, Nina, Noelle, Nora...? Boys are even harder: Nathaniel, Ned, Neil, Noah, Noel, Norman. That’s only fifteen kids!

If she wanted to avoid looking like she just broke out of the women’s wing of the Institute for the Criminally Insane, she should have worn something besides my eighth-grade gymsuit.

There are also a lot of problems with the type of short-term “build some houses, paint the church, dig a well” mission trips you mention, though. Often the projects are chosen by the missionaries rather than by local residents who are better equipped to set priorities for their community, so the work performed isn’t always work that the community really needed. Missionaries are sent over without any actual training in plumbing or bricklaying or whatever, so the work that they perform sometimes has to be redone after they leave at additional expense to the community. These trips are inefficient because money spent on logistics for the missionaries (travel, food, lodging) on a mission trip could easily pay local laborers to do exactly the same projects as the missionaries would be doing with money left over for other things the community needs. I think there is a legitimate need for some kinds of mission work — missionaries with advanced training in medicine, dentistry, engineering, etc. can go on a short trip to an area and make a huge difference by providing services that aren’t always available locally. But the rest of these trips seem primarily like self-righteous vacations even if they do involve some degree of work. I’m sure some of the people who go truly believe that they’re helping and maybe sometimes they are. But a lot of the time these trips honestly come across as an opportunity for someone to see a new country and stroke their egos and take selfies and feel important, like the Bates and Duggars did in the Bahamas. It looks like one of them is about to declare a thumb war.

“Now, honey, remember to keep the defibrillator charged and next to the bed in case he... wait, sorry, that’s just something I have to do for your dad.”

The weird thing is Lowe’s has other kids carts that would seat a child this size. I’ve seen them in every Lowe’s i’ve ever been to in multiple states. They have plastic seats with steering wheels and nascar stickers down the side. They could have just used one of those if whichever emaciated waif this is couldn’t walk. I think whoever said upthread that this was Jill’s attempt to imply her child was disabled to increase the grifting was probably right.

Hahaha! Susannah wouldn’t let her take a pic so she had to add a scanned copy of what looks like a picture from someone’s wedding.

Oh, I don’t think I heard about that. Derick is a dickhead. She probably caught him trying to escape again.

I don’t believe he ever made any public statements saying that was the case, no. The timing is suspect but people leave jobs all the time for all kinds of reasons. It could just have been a matter of him needing something with better pay and benefits once he had a family.

Yes. I see this a lot with the Duggars and the Bateses. During early seasons TLC tried to push this narrative that the two families were really close friends, but now it seems like they don’t even know each other very well. The only true friendship that seems to have come out of that connection is Joy/Carlin. I guess TLC thought it would be too weird to show a family with no friends.

Well, I wasn’t suggesting it would happen every day, but I know a lot of women who occasionally meet over coffee at someone’s house. Some are SAHMs who meet during the week and chat while their kids play, and some are working moms who get together on the weekend. My neighbor has an open-door coffee thing two Saturdays a month and a ton of us take our kids and go over there. It’s a fun, casual way to spend time with friends. Obviously not everyone will have time to do that, and that’s okay. I do think Jill would like to have the kind of house where this happens. I think maybe people underestimate the fact that by becoming estranged from her family, she’s lost her entire community. She never had secular friends or even acquaintances. And I can’t imagine any of the fundies choosing pants-wearing, nose-pierced, birth-control-using Jill over the magical TV Duggars. So she has who, cousin Amy and Derick and the boys? That’s just a recipe for further isolation of a woman who was already isolated. I hope she does make some friends. She needs them badly.

I’m glad to see that Jill has the boys wear helmets for biking. I’ve never seen a child biking in knee and elbow pads, so I’m not going to judge her for that. Scraped knees and elbows aren’t the end of the world. We got Mini Mistake a balance bike. She hates it. I’m wishing I had just saved the $60 and purchased a regular bike with training wheels for her. I think Jill would really like to have the kind of house where neighbors come for dinner and the other moms just drop in for coffee every morning. Unfortunately I think she is too uncomfortable for this to happen. I try to keep in mind that for Jill, forming relationships or even socializing with anyone other than fundies is still outside of her comfort zone. She’s working on it, and I think she’ll get to a point eventually where the relationships become more natural, but she’s not there yet.

My theory has always been that Jana wants to marry eventually. I don’t think she wants to be hanging around the TTH changing Jim Bob’s diapers in 30 years. But I also don’t think she wanted to become an almost-teen bride and start popping out a baby every two years like her siblings were doing. I don’t think she wants to have 10+ kids and struggle to raise them on a shoestring like she watched her parents do before TLC came knocking, and I think she believes enough in the Gothard/IBLP “rules” that she wouldn’t use any type of birth control. So her only choice was really to wait to marry until she was old enough that she could count on only having a reasonable number of kids. Plus, things at the TTH are finally getting to a point where Jana has some time to herself. There are no more babies, toddlers, or preschoolers in permanent residence and when the married kids come over Hannie and Jenny are old enough to amuse their offspring. She can do some traveling (and it isn’t even always with Jim Bob along!) and work on her hobbies. She has her own social media accounts so I assume she’s being allowed some internet freedom. Honestly, this is probably the best she’s ever had it there.

Things could have gone much worse for the Duggars after the Josh news broke if Anna hadn’t been willing to keep sweet and toe the party line. She’s got JB over a barrel, whether she knows it or not.

Please leave poor Becky out of it. I don’t want her going viral without the context that shows she’s obviously satire.

I’m going to side with Jill on this one. When it comes to foodborne pathogens, eating at your local Chipotle is nowhere near as dangerous as eating raw, unpeeled fruits and vegetables in a developing country. We aren’t just worried about e. Coli. Salmonella, hepatitis, campylobacter... there are a ton of different organisms that are food and water borne that can make you sick enough to ruin your vacation, or even kill you. I have no doubt Jill and Derick are not the most culturally sensitive people in the world, but following commonsense advice from the CDC and the WHO does not an ugly American make. Besides, can you imagine if they’d fed Izzy uncooked veggies and he’d gotten sick? People would be raking Derick and Jill over the coals and calling for CPS investigations. Regarding street food, this is just anecdotal and you gotta do you, but in South America Mr. Mistake ate some undercooked food from a street vendor and we lost three days of our vacation because he couldn’t do anything except drink Gatorade and... well, you can guess the other thing. Fortunately we had Cipro with us, because otherwise we’d probably have lost a lot more time. I guess like we were talking about above, it’s all risk versus reward.

Apparently Ben didn’t vote for Trump. And he actually says he thinks evangelicals who believed Trump was of poor moral character but voted for him anyway because Clinton was worse were wrong to have done so. Can’t see many other Duggars thinking things through that much. Ben talks politics