TLC addiction

It's official. I am obsessed with the show John and Kate Plus Eight. I don't know if it's the whole maternal instinct thing (all of those babies) or the fact that I love any reality show about a normal family full of decent, kind people (Little People, Big World, I heart you too), but it's my new favorite thing on television. And with the whole writers strike, it might be the only new thing on television I have for a while. The new season started last night, and I swear I find this family to be so incredibly fascinating. From the early episodes when the sextuplets were little babies who stumbled around, babbled and stared blankly (as little babies often do), to the current episodes when the sextuplets are 3 and can talk and walk and do all of those human things, it's so interesting to me to watch how little personalities are created. I do love babies, so maybe I'm biased, but how cool is it that six little people who were born at the same time and raised side by side can be so vastly different. There are all of these reality shows about people who live famous and so called fabulous lives or about people who do incredible or weird things, but I end up being a lot more interested in the simple, human miracle that is the emergence of a person from what was once a tiny infant literally unable to do a thing for itself. You think of an adult and it's just a given that they're going to have a complex and multi-layered personality full of quirks and habits and contradictions. But it's sometimes hard to connect that with an infant who can't even burp without assistance. So I love John and Kate Plus Eight because the whole personality development process is right there and multiplied by six. I don't need Tila Tequila or Bret Michaels or the real housewives of Orange County. The Goslings fascinate me far more than any of them ever could.