<p>Oh my. I was watching Say Yes to the Dress last night, when I saw commercials that announced arrival of the 1st grandchild. 90 minute special on Tuesday. They keep on coming!</p>
<p>18 kids, 1 on the way, a daughter-in-law and a new granddaughter.</p>
<p>Whew</p>
<p>Yeah, and they’re announcing the birth by calling the new baby the first “grandduggar”. Yikes.</p>
<p>The Duggars deeply disturb me</p>
<p>I think they deeply disturb many of us. But when you watch their show you get so caught up in it, you find yourself almost drinking the kool-aid.</p>
<p>I’ve seen bits of the show several times. They are good-hearted people. It oddly irks me that they need a translator on nearby mission trips south. Come on, 18 kids - can’t one of them learn Spanish?</p>
<p>The Duggar kids are homeschooled. We homeschooled our kids, and found that learning a foreign language was pretty difficult in a homeschool setting. Sometimes on the homeschool lists of which I’m a member, people will ask what curriculum to use teach their kids a foreign language. Some of the parents say they have some success with this or that curriculum, but I’m skeptical. For a foreign language to “click”, it seems like you need to have face to face instruction by someone who knows the language. So, I understand why none of them have learned Spanish.</p>
<p>Although I should add that S1 did several years of Spanish at home which seemed pretty ineffective to me. Then, we went on two mission trips to Mexico. We had translators along, but they weren’t with us all the time, so we did get some practice. In college, S1 studied French. He just returned from a trip to Costa Rica where he took public buses and traveled across the country. He said that quite a bit of his h.s. Spanish came back to him and he thought he did pretty well (except for when he tried to speak French to them!). I was surprised.</p>