Big families

On bad days (and even good ones) Mia Freedman discovers there's nothing like a bit of perspective to put you in your place as a mum. I've recently become quite obsessed with large families. Really large families.

In my third trimester, I always develop tunnel vision and begin to focus in hard on birth and babies at the expense of all else. This has an extreme affect on my TV viewing.

Fortunately, we have pay-TV, which gives me access to the wonderful Discover Home & Health channel which has a million reality shows and documentaries about birth, babies and families. I watch them all.

A few years ago during my last pregnancy, I became fixated on a program called "Make Room For Baby". The format went like this: each episode, the show followed a mother giving birth in hospital while back at home, her friends and family worked with an interior decorator and builder to create the parents' dream nursery.

Since the American hospital system tends to chuck you out after 48hrs or less, the pressure was on to complete the nursery during the time the mother was in hospital, ready to surprise her when she arrived home with the baby. It was birth doco meets home makeover and it was strangely addictive.

Lordy, I watched a lot of episodes of this show. It was like comfort food for my eyes.

I've barely watched Discovery Home & Health since giving birth last time (post-birth, bizarrely, all I wanted to watch was the Food channel) but my remote control has once again steered me there as I wait for this next baby to turn up.

And oh how much fun I'm having. The nursery makeover show has been replaced by a whole new genre: shows about big families. Huge families. Families with a dozen children. Families with sixteen children. And my favourite, the Duggar Family, who are expecting their 18th child on January 1st next year.

As well as the big family shows are the shows about multiple babies. Shows about triplet births. Quads. Quintuplets. You think you're doing it tough with one newborn? Try three, four or five. AND WHAT ABOUT SIX? Continued...