You must be living under a rock if you haven't watched The Little Couple! The show has not only won the hearts of the audience in the nation but has acquired a fan base of millions worldwide. It is an American TV series on TLC which started airing on May 26, 2009, and is still going strong with 13 seasons so far.
The X-factor with this couple is they are both under 4 feet in height. The main lead, Bill Klein, has a condition called Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia, or SED. His wife, Dr. Jen Arnold, who is a neonatologist, has the same condition, and she stands 3 feet 2 inches tall. She has had more than thirty surgeries so far. Apart from featuring struggles and hard times, it also features their successes and their adorable cute kids Will and Zoey. Today, we are going to share ten behind the scene details that you probably don't know.
The Scripted Parties
All the celebrations, birthdays, parties, and events they feature on the show are all staged and pulled off just for the cameras. Yes, that is true. The couple has admitted that they do it just for their TV fans. It makes sense too because a party with cameras moving around and scanning all faces is not what we want to go to for celebrating something.
No one wants to have a camera capturing all the emotions from every possible angle after a long day of work. They say they host real parties without cameras, so that means double celebrations. Win-win for everyone. It's a very good recipe for a better upbringing of the kids.
Not Everything Is Perfect
When you are “little” in the world of overtly average size people and have some rare health issues, you face a lot of hard times, be it day to day struggles or surgeries or just hard times. The little couple Will and Jen face these too, but the real complex problems that they face are never featured on camera. Like when Jen and Will went to India to adopt and take their new baby daughter home, nothing was right among this family and Jen was down health-wise too. But, that was not featured.
We fans think they are a perfect family and every day seems to be rosy, but these guys are vulnerable just like any other people or family and they have their own set of difficulties to tend to.
Bill And Jen Face Bashing About The Adoptions
The couple wanted kids and so they had applied to a few countries for adoption. While they had started the year-long legal adoption procedure for William from China, by a stroke of luck, the LPA, Little People of America, also called them about approval of their adoption application that had been submitted four long years earlier.
It was really just a matter of chance and they were pretty excited, so they decided to go ahead with it and announced the adoption of both the kids. They expected support, but what they received behind the scenes was huge criticism. Everyone started criticizing the sudden simultaneous adoption of two kids saying that they won’t give them a good upbringing.
Fans Turn Up At Their Homes All The Time
When you are a celebrity and a reality star on a show like Keeping up with the Kardashians or the Little Couple, each and every facet and detail of your life are served up on the TV. Nothing is private about you; not your parties, photos, social media, kids, life, not even your home.
Fans keep swinging by their home all the time and expect them to be jovial about it. While it is flattering to think of, it gets pretty annoying at times. Lots of people write them letters, lots of them send them stuff in the mail, and some people seem to think it’s okay to drop by uninvited at any time, holiday or not.
Jennifer Had A Miscarriage
Jennifer had been trying to get pregnant for a long, long time. And, after two years of fertility treatments and surrogacy with miscarriages, out of the blue one day she got the news that she was pregnant. She says she couldn’t believe it and the feeling was incredible.
This was the time when William their first kid was already adopted and they were under the process of getting everything cleared out for the adoption of their second kid Zoey. This had them all jolting in surprise and happiness, but soon after they were advised that the pregnancy was not viable.
Struggling To Bond With The Kids
In reality, the little couple has been trying very hard to bond with their adopted kids. Adopting one kid is difficult in itself and bonding with even one is quite a task. We can totally understand the difficulty they must be having in keeping up with the kids, both adopted from different countries.
It is not that hard to gauge why they could be struggling. After the adoption of Zoey, they thought they became one big happy family, but little did they know that it would take some time to get the family bonded and talking and communicating well. It didn’t help that Jen got diagnosed with a rare uterine cancer while Zoey's adoption was underway.
Favorite Moment Of Jennifer On The Show So Far
Jennifer stated in one interview that the adoption day of Willam is her favorite moment from the show. She said she gets teary-eyed while even thinking about it as it was a heavenly experience for her. She termed that to be the most amazing in-house video.
The most notable thing here is that Jen had suffered miscarriages and failed pregnancies before the couple decided to adopt. William was the first kid they adopted, and he is from China. They had applied to several places in different countries, but China approved the application before the rest.
What Kids Think About Cameras
Most of the people in any part of the world think it would be pretty difficult to raise kids in an environment where everything is captured by cameras and all achievements or stupid mistakes become headlines. The couple must have been apprehensive about that too, but they got lucky. In their words, they are pretty ‘whatever’ about the cameras and do not actually pay much attention to them anymore.
If they are moving about and playing or something and if the camera bumps them, they just ask them to “Move Move Move.” Kids are resilient, and the cameras are pretty much just part of the background.
Fans Drop In The Shop Hoping To See Them
Being a celebrity brings a different set of atrocities and tough experiences altogether. While the fans of this hugely popular couple watch, talk, stalk, and discuss them on social media and such, some of them don't even leave them be in their home. Some of them drop by their home uninvited, as already noted.
However, the couple opened a pet store named Rocky & Maggie's, named after their two dogs, and now fans keep trickling into the store. Most of the time, they don’t buy anything, they just come by to see and meet them and learn that Jen isn’t there. That must get on a person’s nerves sometimes. Bill said his mother-in-law tries her best to get them to buy something, but most of them don’t even have pets.
William Facing Sleep Apnea
Their elder child William, whom they adopted from China, has a disorder called sleep apnea. It is a potentially serious and dangerous sleep disorder where a person’s breathing stops and starts while sleeping. The symptoms can be that a person snores very loudly during sleep and doesn’t feel refreshed upon waking and there is a tired feeling even after a long night sleep.
It turned out that William already had this condition right from birth. They are seeing a physician to help him with this. They went to Delaware and got him professionally diagnosed, the results of which were alarming. They are working their best to help their kid out of it.