SpaghettiTuesdays

Can somebody help a snarker out and pm the links? FJ makes my head hurt with all the info. And if what yall said about the pool is true, I hope Bin is sent over to build another fence.

This post is a little older, but I wanted to say exactly this. I pretty much raised my younger siblings and some of my younger cousins as well. At fourteen, I was left for days at a time with 5 kids under 4. Anyway, I tried my best. I learned as I went. I wasn't a mother in the sense that I wasn't necessarily thinking about their futures, I was thinking of how I was going to get through the day, who needed a bath, what time I last fed the baby. The kids I helped raised are preteens and teenagers now and most of them aren't doing too well. It's not the fault of the sister-mom, it's the fault of whoever put them in that situation. If you result to letting children raise children, the situation is probably pretty crappy to begin with. Just my take on things.

I wonder if UP offered to pay and the Bateses said no. I feel like they would do something like that in order to be fair, both to the kids already married and to those who will marry after the show is over. That being said, baby Carson is such a cutie. I'm a sucker for babies but I tear up every time I see Chad or Erin holding their little guy.

I really cracked up at the guys who asked if she (Maggie or Emma) wanted to party.

I have no idea. I thought there were laws? The follow up did say they received tons of citations. I really hope people aren't staying there and the whole place is just buldozed. Not a healthy or safe environment for anyone. And when they added the security system, those shiny new cameras looked so out of place on the old, dingy, dilapidated building. I also thought she was rather dimwitted that she thought her excuses of "I didn't know" would work. I can see how she might not know about the bees being as bad as they were, but I guarantee she knew about everything else. The mold thing was terrible. I don't see how anyone could stay there for more than a few minutes, let alone a week or whatever for vacation. I would've slept in the car over that.

@seashelllover - The code isn't working for me?

I'll be in the outskirts of Honolulu! I've done a lot of research already. I love to be outside so it's pretty much all hiking/watersports/beach bumming!!

Thank you!! I was thinking about moving there after I graduated college a couple years ago but I actually talked to people who lived there and they talked me out of it. I think I would go "island crazy". But maybe I'll change my mind after I visit! I've never been there before. I'm looking forward to the food most of all. I think the island fusion will be very interesting!

I have to share because I'm so excited and nobody else is awake - but I'm going to Hawai'i at the end of next month! It's a spur of the moment trip with my cousin. She's housesitting for a friend and it just came up. AHHH! I'm so excited!!! This is so unlike me, you don't even know. I'll be broke forever and should probably use the money to pay off my student loans, but TEN DAYS IN HAWAI'I! Only cost is flight and food. :D So happy.

Yeah! If you scrunch your hair and put on a long skirt, you'll blend right in! Just make sure you have a chaperone! Preferably male!

This picture of the Bateses - does Whitney look pregnant to you? She looks like she's rocking a 5 month bump to me... Edit - I read some of the comments and it seems Chad/Erin said Whitney is not pregnant. I looked at more recent ones and she is slimmer. And I'm creeping like crazy on all the Bateses-related instagrams. Super cute photos like this one and this one and you can really see how much Bradley looks like Whitney.

I find it strangely funny how people post on her instagram and FB accounts like they're best friends. I think how I feel about the leg humpers on there must be how the rest of the world percieves the US.

I looked it up because that number seems way too low to me, but this source said around 160. This show needs to air. I'm running out of speculation!!!

Yeah, I like this family, but I also see right through them. Also don't appreciate people who think they're so great because they made their kids famous.

This is going to be kind of long because I've been taking notes during the show and reading all the responses so far. This show has my brain melting and if I don't write stuff down, I go crazy trying to remember stuff. Anyway...] I think the whole "orientation" thing at the school is to have the kids grow up with the mentality that they are the "protectors". They can't tell their parents (or any other adult) what's going on because they might do something dangerous or irrational in response. I think they're putting this mentality in the kids because eventually all of the people in on it will die (unless they're immortal?!?!) and the kids will have to run the place. They are also the last humans, supposedly, so they are the protectors of their race and of the future. Plus, it would suck for "Them" to have done all this work for nothing. I'm also interested in the genetic implications of such a small group. It doesn't seem to have that many people in the town, I'd say less than 500 but certainly no more than a thousand. Probably nowhere near that. So how do they maintain diversity? Maybe they have a cache of frozen embryos, which might be more pragmatic to store. You could have thousands and thousands of potential babies. This would also make sense for the long term because, if the abbies developed over the time from humans, you could weed out the impurities via genetic testing. I'm also thinking there are different "themed" towns (where else would they get their food and stuff from?) with various people living in them, so maybe they swap people every now and then to keep the gene pool fresh and hemophilia at bay. I also have a crazy theory that Pam is Pilcher's wife or something. Maybe Pete was honeypotted by Pam and Pilcher's daughter and woke up to Pam, thinking it was the same woman years apart. For the sake of the community, they should probably train at least some of the teens in medicine. If Pam dies, they're kind of out of luck. Maybe there was a separate society of people that lived in a bunker inside a mountain or underground that lived generation after generation tending to these "hibernating" people. So, in a way, these people are the true protectors of the human race, only they don't have so much innocence and instead have far more responsibility. But, then again, if there was this other group of people, wouldn't they know what happened to humanity? Unless maybe Pilcher didn't share his information with Fisher, or maybe Fisher just didn't want to tell the kids the horrible truth. (Like if there was a nuclear holocaust and the abbies were the fallout-mutants that were left over.) I don't know, just random thoughts. I agree with PP that Chris probably wasn't a real person. The slideshow showed the pictures of the other kids to the viewer (us) but didn't show Chris, just the three kids' faces. Maybe Chris didn't die, though, and they just re-froze him or sent him to live somewhere else. Or maybe he's a longtime member of the community that is going to become important later. Or maybe he lives in the woods, hidden secretly! The possibilities are endless. Ben's actor does well at being awkward. I sometimes have to look away, like during the kiss with what's-her-face. About the quarter - I'm thinking they probably do have bigger/more important artifacts leftover, but it's not practical to show them to a bunch of kids. If they showed photos, many would think they were photoshopped or something. So it's better to give them something tangible, like the quarter Fisher handed Ben, to show that it's real. Not that money can't be faked. And what if the articles are, in fact, faked? It wouldn't be hard to age a coin. Everyone's seen a coin from 2009 that looks super old and a different coin from 1969 that looks brand new. So who's to say that the quarter, the sign, and whatever else were really planted? Conspiracies, I tell you! Final thought - they've taken quite the artistic license with the science mumbo jumbo.

I also love the family dynamic. It's strange to me how Brenda would say that they decided no more kids after Jaeger and she "didn't think [she] could get pregnant" but then had Jada. So I guess they weren't using BC? I guess she thought Jaeger's birth traumatized her body? How could she not know she couldn't get pregnant? I am glad, though, that they put her health before more babies. Smart move. I felt so sad for Jair. You had to really feel for him. It sounds like Mary wanted him to drop everything and expected him to join her and follow her around? That's what I was getting from that, anyway. If that's true, he's better off not being with her anymore, even if it hurts. Relationships, and especially marriage, should be about compromise. I'm also thinking it hurts worse because this was (probably but I have no idea if so) his first relationship. Those break ups are the worst as is, but add that to having it on a tv show, that's even worse. Poor guy. Jackson! Why in the world would you think trying to jump over a spiked fence would be a good idea?!?! I probably would've barfed if I had seen it. I liked that Jet or maybe Jennifer (?) talked about the younger kids wanting to ursurp the older ones. I don't understand why they can't have multiple instrument players? I get that the younger ones are still learning to play, but the older ones are on their third album and obviously started somewhere. I don't think that's fair.

Ah, I see. I was always told that it was the "stricter" group, which I took to mean in behavior, not Biblical interpretation. Thanks for clearing that up.

The new season comes out in September, per Anthony's facebook page. I'm very excited! Looks like they found another syringe...

I thought this was rather interesting, especially hearing the kids talk about balancing their schoolwork while doing everything else on the road. I think it was Jasmine that said something along the line of "you know you have to do it, but you really don't want to because look, there's a mountain! Look, there's desert." I really like this family in that they admit they have faults, they address them or live with them, and move on. There's no pretending to be perfect. Another family might want to take a lesson from them...

This was heartbreaking. I didn't believe anything they said. They can't even speak the truth when they're "speaking the truth". I've been thinking a lot about why they chose Jessa and Jill and I've come to a few conclusions. They're both married, so their reputations won't be hurt by it. They have the most to lose if the show is cancelled, as I don't really believe Jill and Derick could support their current lifestyle without the show and Ben and Jessa certainly couldn't. They've been featured a lot this season, so others who tuned in to watch weddings and babies are probably more likely to be attached. Jessa is logical and in control, Jill is emotional. Both are obediant (because they're dependant). Jill is a mother and Jessa is a mother-to-be (sympathy points?). All of this was arranged. It is dispicable. They've been exploited by their parents their whole lives. Leave them alone. How very, very sad.

After watching this, many of their "parenting techniques" make so much sense. The giant dorm rooms. The encouraging of tattling. Never being alone. Separation of the sexes once they become preteens or so. I am ill after watching this. There is no way, no way, any responsible parent would allow this to happen. I don't know what's in store for this family, but I can only hope the innocent ones can recover, rebuild their lives, and grow to be great people. And I hope everyone gets REAL counseling.

I was thinking they don't even get paid. The jobs are just there for the pretense.

I've never been a JD lover or hater, either (though I've had my moments, depending on the episode) but we also have to remember that we're not getting the real picture. I'm not a fan of his pranks, but I have to wonder how much he was put up to. I think he genuinely likes (most of) his siblings and spends time with them, but I don't get the feeling he's so rosy about his parents and that is probably what keeps him away from the TTH. I see his brothers especially looking up to him. Joseph in particular.

Say what you will about the situation, but it is in incredibly poor taste for the articles to include videos of J & A announcing M4 embeded in the same article that talks about what he did. Shame on you, online news articles.

And especially now that they're cancelled.