Angelina Jolie talks about her 6 kids
Pretty soon you’ll have six kids all under the age of 8. Have you thought about how you’re physically going to be able to handle that?
Well, we weren’t expecting twins! So it did shock us, and we jumped to six quickly. But we like a challenge. We really don’t know. His mom and dad are on standby to come out and help. And fortunately we can hire help if we need it, but we’re going to try as we usually do to balance it as well as we can. The only thing for us when a new child comes home is just balancing the others. Our real focus now is: How do we make sure that the babies’ coming is not upsetting to other kids and makes them feel included. They’re old enough to feel included to change diapers themselves, to feed bottles themselves, like if I pump into a bottle. We’re trying to find ways where it can be a fun group thing. But the hard thing is every single day trying to find time for each of them privately. ‘Cause that’s our big thing. With our eldest, we have that last half an hour at night; Shiloh tends to be the first up in the morning. Everybody gets special time so we can make sure we know where they’re at.
What would be your ideal way to spend a free Saturday?
I have a lot of those. Very simple things. On weekends we usually have family sleep. We always have one night a week where everybody stays up late, watches a movie, and stays in our bed. We have, like, a slumber party.
Is there intense competition among the kids as to who sleeps where?
Yeah, but it’s funny: The boys tend to want to be near Mommy [Angelina Jolie] and the girls tend to want to be near Daddy [Brad Pitt]. So it works out nicely.
What did you make of all the brouhaha over Jack Black’s spilling that you were having twins on the Today show?
Poor Jack! Immediately when he saw Brad, he apologized. But we both told him very clearly that we had only waited because, as you do with any baby, but especially twins, you wait until all results are in on their health, and that we were past that point and if somebody had asked me directly, I would have said yes. So he didn’t do anything but take the heat himself.
