Jacqueline MacInnes Wood Baby Number 5

Yesterday at roughly ten past four in the afternoon, I was lying spread-eagled on our sitting room rug while Twin A attempted to forcefully insert a plastic spoon into Twin B's left nostril. I had what I sincerely hoped was mashed banana in my hair, a dull ache behind my right eye, and an intense sense of my own mortality. My phone buzzed on the floor next to my ear. It was a push notification from some pop culture site informing me about the newest Jacqueline MacInnes Wood baby.

I just laid there on the carpet, staring at a stray Cheerio stuck to the skirting board, trying to make the maths work in my sleep-deprived brain. Five kids. Five boys. All under the age of six. My twin girls are two, and I barely have the mental capacity to tie my own shoelaces most mornings. The idea of adding a newborn, a three-year-old, a four-year-old, and a six-year-old to this specific room right now makes me want to hyperventilate into a brown paper bag.

The sheer maths of five small children

I genuinely don't understand the physical logistics of moving that many tiny humans from one location to another. Just getting our two girls out of the flat and onto the pavement requires a military-grade operation involving bribes, threats, and a ridiculous double pram that gets wedged in every single doorway in London. If you've five boys that young, you surely don't use a pram anymore. You must have to herd them like sheep, perhaps with a whistle and a highly trained collie.

The star of The Bold and the Beautiful apparently had a planned home birth for this fifth one, which sounds terribly spiritual and lovely but I personally require immediate access to highly trained professionals with vast quantities of epidural fluid in a heavily sterilized environment, thanks very much. We did the hospital route, mostly because our flat is the size of a shoebox and I'm fairly certain the downstairs neighbours would have called the police if we'd tried to deliver twins in the living room.

Why the internet cares so much about boys

What completely baffled me wasn't just the sheer volume of children, but the absolute state of the internet's reaction to the Jacqueline MacInnes Wood baby number 5 gender reveal. People absolutely lost their collective minds over the fact that she had another boy, named Talon. Complete strangers on Reddit and Instagram were having full-blown meltdowns, practically demanding to know why she didn't have a girl.

This whole culture of gender disappointment projection is wild to me. People treat family planning like a slot machine where you're supposed to keep pulling the lever until you get the matching set. I've had perfectly normal-looking people stop me in the supermarket, look at my identical daughters, and ask me in a tragic whisper if we're "going to try for a boy." Usually while Twin A is actively trying to eat a raw onion from the produce bin. I usually just stare at them until they slowly back away. You've just got to bin your phone and completely ignore the weirdos projecting their own strange family dynamics onto yours before the sheer weight of unsolicited opinions crushes you into dust.

The reality of back to back babies

When the girls were about eight months old and nobody in our house had slept for more than three consecutive hours since the previous spring, I made the mistake of making a joke to Dr. Patel at our local GP surgery about having a third. He looked at me over his spectacles with a mix of deep pity and sheer medical horror.

He sort of mumbled something about interpregnancy intervals and how the human body basically needs at least eighteen months to un-crumple itself after birth. I'm pretty sure he meant that if you just keep having babies back to back, your iron and folate stores entirely empty out and your bones might actually snap like dry twigs, though my grasp on biology is admittedly shaky at best. Wood is thirty-eight, which the medical establishment aggressively refers to as a "geriatric pregnancy" because doctors seemingly love to insult exhausted women. Managing five of these back-to-back pregnancies while keeping your pelvic floor intact sounds less like a medical event and more like an extreme Olympic sport.

Survival gear for a crowded house

If you're raising multiple children, whether they're twins like mine or a small army of boys, you desperately need things that keep them quietly occupied so you can stare blankly at the wall for four minutes. The Bear Teething Rattle Wooden Ring Sensory Toy is actually my favorite bit of kit in our flat right now. Twin B has been gnawing on the untreated beechwood ring like a tiny rabid beaver for three weeks straight because her back molars are coming in and she's furious about it. I love it mostly because it's completely silent, doesn't flash neon lights at me, and actually seems to distract her from attempting to bite her sister's ankles.

On the other hand, we also have the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. They're fine. They're made of soft rubber, which I suppose I deeply appreciate when one of them inevitably gets hurled directly at my forehead while I'm trying to drink my morning coffee. But honestly they're just more things I've to fish out from underneath the sofa every night while my knees pop.

If you want a look at toys that won't make your living room look like a primary-colored plastic explosion, you should check out some of these sustainable wooden options that genuinely last through multiple kids.

When the girls were a bit younger and couldn't walk yet, we relied heavily on the Wooden Baby Gym. It was absolutely brilliant for trapping them in one spot while I hurriedly shoved a piece of cold toast into my mouth over the kitchen sink. The natural wood design meant I didn't feel like I was living inside a massive toy box, and the hanging animal toys somehow kept them mesmerised long enough for me to drink half a cup of tea before it went entirely cold. If you're going to hand things down from kid number one all the way to kid number five, you really need stuff made of actual wood rather than cheap plastic that shatters the moment a toddler steps on it.

Embracing the total loss of control

Wood posted something on her social media about leaning into the stillness and the quiet magic of new beginnings. I read that quote while picking dried porridge off my trousers. I don't think there's been a single moment of stillness in our flat since 2021.

But maybe that's the secret to surviving five boys under six. At some point, you just have to surrender to the noise. You stop trying to keep the house tidy, you accept that someone will always be crying, and you just sort of float through the chaos like a ghost haunting your own life. It sounds exhausting, but also weirdly freeing. Though I'll happily stick with just my two tiny agents of destruction, thanks.

If you're staring down the barrel of your own chaotic parenting journey and need gear that won't fall apart after a week, browse the full collection of durable baby items here before the next tantrum starts.

Answers to questions you might genuinely have

How do you handle the judgement about your kids' genders?
You mostly just have to laugh when strangers get deeply invested in your reproductive outcomes. People will literally corner you in a coffee shop to tell you why you need a boy or a girl to "complete" your family. I usually just tell them we're raising two feral racoons and walk away while they try to figure out if I'm joking.

Is it really that bad to have babies close together?
My doctor made it sound like your body essentially runs out of battery juice if you don't give it a massive break between pregnancies. From what I understood through my sleep-deprivation haze, your vitamin stores get totally wiped out, making the next pregnancy significantly harder on your bones and energy levels. But somehow people manage it without disintegrating.

How do you afford gear for multiple kids?
You stop buying plastic rubbish that breaks in three days. We quickly learned that buying one slightly more expensive wooden toy is way cheaper than replacing a cheap electronic thing five times. Also, you beg your friends for hand-me-downs and accept that your youngest will probably wear slightly faded sleepsuits for the first year of their life.

What's the actual hardest part of having multiple toddlers?
The noise. Nobody warns you about the sheer volume of the noise. It's not just crying, it's the constant dropping of objects, the shrieking over who gets the blue cup, and the bizarre dinosaur sounds they make at six in the morning. You eventually just develop a sort of targeted deafness to survive.