KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN (60 page)

This is from a publicity release for
Multiple Blessings
:

Beth Carson, the couple’s friend, offered to help them “capture the memories on paper” of their unique family situation. “I had told her (Carson) numerous times that I needed to write this book … for the kids,” Gosselin explained. “I need them to know how much that they were wanted, loved and
know it wasn’t the plan we had (to have them.)
It was the plan God had for our family.”

Now a cynical person like me would wonder aloud why Kate didn’t just take the time each day to actually talk to her kids and tell them herself how much she loved and wanted them. That would surely have helped them feel safe and secure at their very tender age, much more so than having those sentiments expressed in a 200-page book that was written by someone else and carefully edited by a team of professionals.

And why Kate feels the need to keep bringing up the fact they she didn’t “plan” to have them and that it was all God’s idea is really strange.

It’s amazing how Kate’s own words in her journal were sterilized by Zondervan for
I Just Want You To Know
to suit their own needs and to help exploit the Gosselin children for profit. For example, Kate wrote a journal entry about how she and Jon dealt with an injury to their daughter, Leah. Here are the lowlights:

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

• Leah had fallen out of bed and there “was BLOOD everywhere!!!!”
  
• She had a “huge gash on her forehead!!!!!”
  
• Kate said the gash was about three-quarters of an inch long and gaping open.
  
• Jon and Kate (the nurse) debated whether to take Leah to the emergency room but because Kate was getting a cold on top of being “exhausted” they decided to skip the trip.
  
• In the morning the gash was still oozing blood and Kate was still “torn as to what to do about it” so reluctantly made an appointment with the doctor, but then cancelled it and opted to have a neighborhood trauma nurse take a look at it after she got home from work at 11:15 am.
  
• The nurse of course thought the gash should have been stitched and Kate wrote “Oops.” She felt bad about it but just didn’t want to take Leah by herself after the rough day she had the day before dealing with one of the twin’s teeth.
  
• Kate wondered if she was being selfish when she made the decision to patch Leah’s gaping wound with steristrips rather than taking her to the ER to get stitches.
  
• Kate wrapped up the entry by praying to God about Leah, saying that she knows that He loves Leah more than she does and asks Him to heal her as ‘good as new.’ Amen.
  

This same story appeared in
I Just Want You To Know
, but it had to be toned down so Kate didn’t appear to be uncaring and dismissive of the needs of her injured child. In the book version (page 128 if want to read it for yourself), the gash on Leah’s head got smaller by a third, and Kate left out the part about her being too exhausted to take Leah to the hospital for treatment (not to mention the added excuse that Kate was “getting a cold!”).

So Kate waited until 11:15 the following morning for a trauma nurse friend to come by after work to check out the wound and tell Kate she thought if should have been stitched. “Oops.” Kate’s 2-year-old daughter had a huge gash in her head that was bleeding through the night, but Kate didn’t want to take her to the hospital by herself, and she couldn’t deal with more nerve-wracking stuff.

SICK

Here are a few of Kate’s paraphrased journal entries where she talked about Leah and Aaden getting sick with pneumonia:

December 2006

Kate said “the six” have been coughing and wheezing for at least a week until she finally decided that she should listen to Leah with her stethoscope. She heard wheezing and other crackly noises that made her nervous so she called the doctor and was upset to hear that they wanted to call in a round of steroids to decrease her inflammation. Kate was not at all happy with that and wanted Leah seen that day because they had a filming weekend coming up and there was no time.
She later found out that Leah had pneumonia.

Later,
Aaden sounded the same and Kate requested that the doctor call in a prescription of Zithromax without seeing him. The doctor’s office called back and Kate said they accused her of being fraudulent and said the doctor would NEVER do something like that. Kate said to herself I guess, that she knew that was a lie because the doctor has done “the same thing in the past!!!!!” Kate said that the office staff was annoyed with her and just wanted to make her life difficult. She went on to add that she’d had enough of the office staff and the entire “area and medical care is quite backwards!”

All wasn’t so bad though as s
he ended the entry by writing about all the free stuff she got because of rushing off to the grocery store and then to the Park City mall for Christmas shopping while being filmed by the camera crew.

December 2006

Aaden didn’t get better and in fact, developed “hives of all things!” And now Kate is very annoyed! She called the doctor’s office “and talked to 900 people until she got “a jerk of a doctor, Dr. Baker” who according to Kate treated her like she had no brains let alone medical experience as a nurse!!!!
(Remember, this is the nurse who was too tired to take a child to the ER who had a gaping gash in her head that bled through the night.)

Kate ended the entry by discussing the fun she had doing the narration of their show opening and her five outfit changes for the day.

When Kate included this story about Leah and Aaden’s pneumonia in
I Just Want You To Know
, she, or some editors, left out all the parts where she complained about the backwards medical care in her area, and where she mentioned filming. Kate revealed that she hadn’t tended to her children’s coughs until after the coughing lasted for almost a week, but she made darn sure to get Leah to the doctor when it looked like her illness might jeopardize upcoming filming. After Leah was diagnosed with pneumonia, Kate still made sure to keep her appointment to meet Jen and Scott and Mike for filming at the Giant grocery store. That was on the very same day she had “sick babies to come home to.” Kate didn’t let anything disrupt filming, not even pesky pneumonia.

Kate continued to sing her own praises in
I Just Want You To Know
. She wrote that she had to work hard to convince the doctor’s office staff that when one of the eight got sick, they all did.

Wow. It must have been an amazing revelation to the staff of a pediatrician’s office to learn that when one child in a family gets sick, other children in the family get sick as well. Thank goodness Kate worked so hard to convince them of this. She is insufferable when she acts like her family requires special treatment just because it happens to be bigger than other families. She couldn’t possibly get any more pompous and ridiculous.

This
thought from
I Just Want You To Know
sums up how Kate plays the “I deserve sympathy” card:

              Finding a babysitter last-minute for seven kids so I could take one sick child to the doctor was part of my job as a mother of eight little kids.

Part of the job of any mom or dad is to find last-minute babysitters when necessary, whether they have one child or 100. Luckily for Kate, she could call on her sister-in-law Jody for last-minute babysitting at the drop of a hat (until Kate banished Jody from her and her kids’ lives, that is). Thank goodness Jody was available that day to take care of the sextuplets, including two who were sick with pneumonia, so Jon and Kate could take Mady and Cara to the mall to be filmed Christmas shopping.

THE POOP STORY

Kate got a lot of mileage out of stories that were meant to show how very difficult it was for her to take care of her brood. This is the “Poop Story” as Kate wrote it in her journal.

Friday
2006

Kate said “
Today was a mad day!!!!!!” She was relieved that she had nothing scheduled for the day besides the usual craziness, but during nap time, Kate decided to wake the tups up and noticed that one of the girls was sleeping in poop from head to toe and it was all over her crib. Kate was freaking out. She described the scene vividly as the poop was mashed into the bottoms of both feet and on her sheet, blankets, a book in her crib and some was even flung onto another girl’s crib. Ever the loving and compassionate mother, Kate became instantly angry and woke the poor child up with her “angry voice!!!!!” She stood the child in the bath tub to soak her feet and showered her. She said “the poor little thing was shaking with coldness or fear or something!” Kate cleaned everything up and talked about having to spank all six of the little ones the day before for getting into a tissue box. Then she had an ugly incident with another little girl who decided to play in some water in the kitchen and made a water mess for Kate to clean up.  Kate said she had had enough and put her in her crib until Jon came home. She told Jon that he could go and “get the little monster and feed her dinner!”

When Kate recounted this same story in
I Just Want You To Know,
she conveniently left out the spanking part and the part where the “poor little thing was shaking with coldness or fear or something.” I guess it made for better Christian reading without the violence and neglect.

I don’t know about you, but going into parenthood, I knew it would be a difficult and frustrating job sometimes. I spent nine months reading everything I could from every available resource to help prepare myself to become the best parent I could be. Some of the best memories of childhood for a parent are when the little ones get into things and wreak havoc. The funniest photos are when the little ones dump a plate of spaghetti over their heads or get into whatever and are sitting there smiling and laughing, or when they pull out all the tissues from the tissue box and are surrounded by the mess. Most parents run to get the camera to capture precious moments like that.

Kate is not most parents. Kate spanked her children in those moments. She spanked 2-year-old babies for doing exactly what 2-year-old babies do. And she said she put a “soaking and dripping wet” Alexis into her crib and left her there until Jon got home. She doesn’t even realize that she makes herself sound like the most uncaring, inept mother of all time.