The Duggars keep counting on, but even daughter Jinger Duggar’s memory can’t always keep up.
“I struggle to remember all the names of the grandkids,” Jinger, 31, jokingly told her sister Joy-Anna, 27, on the Wednesday, March 19, episode of her “Jinger & Jeremy” podcast. “I have most of them down, but there are a couple — and the newer ones, there are more added all the time.”
She continued, “I feel that pressure in, like, no one else is putting it on me. It’s me because when I go back, I’m like, ‘I feel so bad. I didn’t get to connect with them.’ Then, it’s like, ‘Oh, I guess it makes sense.’”
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar raised their 19 children in Arkansas, which is where most still live with their own families. Jinger, meanwhile, is one of the few Duggar children to leave the nest, ultimately settling with husband Jeremy Vuolo and their two daughters in Los Angeles.
“We have FaceTime, but I’m not FaceTiming everyone every day,” Jinger, who is also pregnant with baby No. 3, explained. “I feel like I FaceTime the older sisters [the most]. I will stay in contact with them more, and James calls a lot.”
According to Vuolo, 37, they have to be “very intentional” about keeping in touch with relatives.
“When you have little ones, when you’ve got work, you’ve got kids, you’ve got church [or] you’ve got friends, you have to be very intentional about ‘Hey, where’s going to spend time here and here,’” Vuolo said on Wednesday’s episode. “Just because you [Joy] live there … there’s people here that we live five minutes from that we’re not going to see and hang out with unless we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s get it on the calendar.’”
Vuolo further noted that “everybody’s doing their own stuff” whenever he and Jinger do make it back to visit Arkansas.
“[It] is cool to see and they love hanging out together, but then they do have their communities,” he said. “Not everybody goes to the same church and they have their different church communities. … And so, when people do come together for a wedding or a meal, it’s really fun to catch up and hear what’s going on.”
Joy-Anna feels similarly, noting on Wednesday that she doesn’t see the extended family “as much as [she] used to.”
“It is harder to stay connected to everybody, but I feel like we all have a good expectation for everybody,” she explained, “We don’t feel pressure, like, ‘We have to do this together’ or, ‘I haven’t talked to this person this week.’ I have my own family to take care of, and so it’s hard to balance how much do I reach out [and] how much do I not. I want to spend time with all of the siblings.”
Joy-Anna and husband Austin Forsyth are parents of three.
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