eight is so very much enough

ok so i'm never going whine about having two little kids. this is a vow to you people. never again shall i bitch and moan about how scared I am about having more than one little one, about losing sleep, about how hard life is as a parent and boo-hoo-hoo. you see i have made a horrifying discovery: i have discovered Jon & Kate Plus 8.

to those of you with lives who aren't watching Oprah every other minute or religiously tuning into the TLC because you're actually sane might not know what i'm talking about. allow me to breakitdown:

i was at the gym the other day, a rare treat. riding the ol' stationary bike. watching tv. totally zoned out. it was great. i'm flipping through the channels and because i don't really know my way around the cable lineup not having cable at home, i'm just randomly watching whatever. i start with The Hills. i don't really get The Hills, but then i know i'm not the target demographic. i do think my soul died a little bit the day i learned who spencer pratt was. (although, i will say this: justinbobby is kind of rad.) i can't get mad at these children -- they're pretty, paid handsomely to have nary a care in the world.

at a commercial break, i start surfing the channels. i end up on a scene where some mom is wrangling her kids into the kitchen. she appears to have two or three of them. "ah," i say to myself, "this looks familiar. herding cats. heh." i watch for a minute and it slowly begins to dawn on me, she has more than three kids. actually, wait. there's another. she has more than four kids. holy shit. she has more than five kids, seven kids. she has eight fucking kids. and they're all under the age of six or something.

it was at this very moment that my brain broke.

i stayed on the bike for about three hours, my broken brain attempting to process episode after episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8. absolutely captivating television. watch clips here. the scoop, for those of you who don't know it: jon and kate gosselin couldn't get pregnant so they took fertility drugs. then they had twins. so very cute. a sane person would have stopped right there. but they are, apparently, not very sane. she says she wanted to have just one more baby because she didn't know what it was like to not have to split her attention between two babies. ah, but the cosmos loves a good practical joke. instead of one baby she had ... six. at one time. a whole litter of pups.

my broken brain was trying so hard to understand this fact. eight kids. all under the age of four. in one house. sweet jesus.

after watching Jon & Kate for a while (they are, it turns out, very charming and kind of fucking badass, if a little too heavy on the God stuff, at least on their website) i toggled back over to The Hills. the blonde one was on some date with some cute sk8r boy she went to high school with or something and they were all like giving each other loaded meaningful glances over uneaten frisee salad and triple skim lattes and talking about the crisis in darfur. no, wait. they were talking about recent breakthroughs in string theory and quantum physics. hahah. i'm kidding of course. they were talking about, well, it's hard to explain, but i'm sure it was something meaningful about, like, cool stuff. that they bought shopping. and like. yeah. whatever. also, audrina's a slut.

i toggle back to Jon & Kate and there they are just trying to get through breakfast also. it's chaos plus insanity times madness to the power of crazy. i'd buy a whole haberdashery just so i could tip every single hat in it. man.

talk about two very different "reality" shows.

this is when my broken brain formed it's first idea since breaking. it was a fantasy. my fantasy is this: i want heidi and spencer to have eight kids. i want lauren and brody to have eight kids. i want audrina and justinbobby to have eight kids. i want all those ratfaced little Hills turds to have eight kids just for one day. that is something i'd subscribe to cable to watch.