20 questions: A day with the Duggars

The goal is to have fun and enjoy being together, and to go with the flow, no matter what happens.

One of our family traditions is that when we go somewhere together, such as an amusement park, we all wear the same-color shirts as a way of keeping track of everyone. Because we are a large “crowd,”

even when it’s just our family, we seem to attract attention wherever we go, and that day in Silver Dollar City was no exception. “Oh, is this a school group?” a woman asked us on the tram that carried us from the parking lot to the park entry.

Michelle, who was pregnant at the time, smiled and said, “No, this is our family.”

The woman counted heads then turned back to Michelle, her eyes wide, and asked another one of the questions we hear, in one form or another, almost every day: “Are they all yours?”

Usually that comment is followed by something along the lines of, “You sure do have your hands full!” or, “How do you do it?” or, “Wow! I can’t imagine how you do it. I can barely keep up with my two!” and even, “How in the world can you afford them?”

Video   17 kids … and counting! Dec. 2: The Duggars, the family famous for their ever-growing brood, talk with the TODAY hosts about how they manage to raise 17 children and what they’re expecting for baby number 18! Today show

A gift and a joy
Those comments and questions started back when we had four children. Now that we have seventeen, with our eighteenth due any day, we hear even more of them. Plus, as this book goes to press, we are happy to have gained a daughter-in-law. Our son, Josh, recently married the delightful Anna Keller, bringing our total family-member count to twenty-one.

Whenever we go anywhere together, we usually hear lots of questions and comments. But the answer to such questions still comes easily, just as it always has. That day on our way into Silver Dollar City, Michelle smiled and said pleasantly to the questioning woman, “Yes, they’re all mine, and we are grateful to God for each one of them. They are a gift and a joy.”

We count every one of our children as a blessing from God. But we understand that supersize families are unusual these days, and we’ve grown accustomed to the stares, questions, and comments wherever we go. We also understand that there’s a lot of curiosity. Parents of one or two children who are exhausted at the end of every day wonder how parents of eighteen children can survive. Families who struggle to make mortgage and car payments while providing for their children wonder how we can provide for our large family with no debt. Folks who have trouble finding a pair of matching socks to wear wonder how we manage the laundry for all twenty of us.

Questions about these issues pour into our website by the thousands, and there’s no way we can possibly answer them all individually. So we’ve written this book, hoping our story will both inform and inspire you. We hope that what we’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, can be helpful to families of all sizes. We also hope you’ll see that we’re a family with all the qualities and quirks every other family has, just multiplied many times over. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve lost our tempers. We’ve used poor judgment. We’ve gone through hard times and difficult circumstances. We’ve made poor choices. Although we laugh a lot, we cry sometimes too.

It’s all part of our family’s growing process — and we’ve grown a lot! Each time a problem or opportunity confronts us, we pray for God’s guidance. Amazing things have happened, as you will see. We hope you’ll be as amazed to read about them as we have been as we’ve watched them unfold.

Excerpted from “The Duggars: 20 and Counting!” by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Copyright (c) 2008, reprinted with permission from Howard Books, a division of Simon and Schuster Inc.

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