Quarantining with nine kids in a mobile home was enough to drive parents Eric and Courtney Waldrop “stir crazy,” but slowing down their lives for a few months was a nice change of pace for the Sweet Home Sextuplets family. Ahead of the premiere of all-new episodes of the TLC show kicking off on Tuesday, Sept. 29, the Waldrops spoke with PopCulture.com about the wild year they’ve had preparing to move into their newly-renovated family home.
Fans at home will remember the difficulties Courtney and Eric were having making enough space for all their family in the mobile home they rented while renovations to make enough space for their growing family were underway on their home. So when stay-at-home orders began to drop in March, the mobile home felt like it was about the burst with 2-year-old sextuplets, Layke, Blu, Tag, Rivers, Rayne, and Rawlings as well as their older siblings, 8-year-old twins Wales and Bridge and 11-year-old Saylor.
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“The mobile home is great for a normal-sized family, but for a family of 11, we were busting out of the seams,” Courtney told PopCulture. “It was too small.” Spending almost a year in the mobile home before being able to move back into their home, the TLC star said that despite how cooped up she felt, she and Eric did their best to enjoy the slower pace quarantine brought to their family’s usual hustle and bustle.
“Quarantine was hard, but it was good, because it did slow life down,” she explained. While it was tough to spend so much time without seeing their family and friends, especially those who would help Courtney with the babies, the Waldrops came to enjoy their days fishing and “doing nothing” together. Now, with the older boys back at school and things beginning to pick up again, Courtney jokes she would love to slow down just a bit. “Everything has been at once and it’s been crazy,” she said. “Time has flown.”
Moving the whole family back into their permanent home has been a “very, very exciting” development since fans last saw the Waldrops. Since the renovations finished in July, Courtney said she’s been soaking up how nice it is to have enough space, especially at the kitchen table, which finally has enough room for the whole family. “We’ve always been eating in the living room, so it’s nice,” she said.
Getting back to filming, Eric noted that as the sextuplets grow up, “parts of it are easier, and parts of it are harder.” The kids don’t mind the cameras at all, but documenting this “different stage of their life” requires a bit more flexibility. “I think it depends on the day and how tired everyone is,” he said. “It’s day to day.”
Courtney chimed in that because they “never push the babies or the kids to do something they don’t feel like doing,” filming a show is a “full-time job,” but as the kids get older, they’re getting to show off their personalities more, leading to “such fun and funny moments.” Sweet Home Sextuplets returns for all-new episodes on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TLC. For more on TLC’s stars from PopCulture, click here.
