Free You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning by Celia Rivenbark Page A

type.
    What fascinates—and repels at the same time—is the couple’s weird dynamic: She kvetches and finishes his sentences; he walks around in a semistupor fretting about his workout regimen or his teeth-whitening progress or where they should go on vacation.
    While most fans claim to love this show because of the rambunctious, adorable Gosselin children, I just fast-forward the TiVo through all the boring kid scenes.
    Any time I sniff a
looooong
scene of eight kids eating Cheerios for breakfast, I just go “boo-boop” to get to Jon and Kate chatting on the couch. Until those kids are old enough to discuss the environmental impact of offshore drilling or at least have a mature, intelligent discussion about whether or not Zac Efron is gay, I will speed through the endless “Ball! My ball!” arguments, thank you very much.
    In each episode, Jon and Kate spend a fair amount of screen time sitting on a cramped love seat facing an anonymous interviewer and nudging each other in the ribs (a little too hard, I think) and bantering about their chaotic life as the parents of multiples.
    A bit player in this psycho drama is Aunt Jodi, a slightly anorexic-looking young mom of four with a penchant for clothes that have that distressing “I buy all my clothes from the TV” Quacker Factory vibe to them. Jodi once agreed to take care of the eight little Gosselins—six of whom
had the flu
—while Jon and Kate flew to California so Jon could get hair plugs.
    When Jon got home and complained how much his scalp hurt, Jodi would’ve been within her rights to carve him up like a Christmas ham on the spot, but she is way too nice to do that.
    Another bit is Kate’s unfortunate obsessive-compulsive disorder. Watching her yell at the workmen for installing new blinds incorrectly, as in a tiny fraction off center, was downright uncomfortable. Kate is very big on “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Just ask Jon, whohasn’t been able to do anything right in Kate’s eyes in a very long time, possibly ever.
    We’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a self-absorbed schmoe, surfing the Web while Kate cooks endless organic meals and scrubs imaginary dust from the baseboards.
    If only she’d let him finish a sentence.
    Jon: “We were going to go—”
    Kate: “To the park, but there was a piece of dried bubble gum on the underside of one of the picnic benches, so I said we should skedaddle to the museum—”
    Jon: “Is skedaddle really a word?”
    Kate (giggling): “Shut up, you moron (jabs Jon in the ribs ’til blood spurts out of his mouth).
    Ratings gold, my hons, ratings gold.
    Of course, I’m more than a little concerned now that I hear the Gosselins were so charmed by a vacation to my home state that they’ve decided to move here, probably adding at least a couple of electoral votes upon arrival.
    Because they’re partial to North Carolina beaches, where I live, there’s no doubt in my mind that they’ll pile into the maxivan and cruise two hours east several times a year from their new Carolina home. All eight
adorable
children will spill onto the sand and basically take up every square inch.
    “Beach ball!”
    “My beach ball!”
    And what’s this? Aunt Jodi following along wearing her Quacker Factory bathing suit and schlepping all eight little Gosselin floaty rafts?
    Kate will spend the entire day at the beach arranging and rearranging the chairs until they line up perfectly and screeching at Jon to stop feeding the gulls because it makes them “go all poopie!”
    This is what happens when you’re trapped in a house with eight kids all day. You use phrases like “go all poopie” and you use a weird little singsongy voice.
    Eventually, the Gosselins will probably become the Singing Gosselins even if none of them can actually sing, because this is what very large families with impossibly cute children must do. There will be a Christmas special and they will eventually make everyone forget