Parents with "big" families know that people seem to have tons of opinions about if you have more than two or three kids — but just imagine the unsolicited advice Taina Licciardo-Toivola gets as a mom of 10. However, the mother from Australia isn’t afraid to share details of her big brood's life online — whether that be from homeschooling all 10 of her kids to how she feeds them on a vegan diet. But many people online let their thoughts be known after the mom shared that she recently spent a whopping $5,000 on her 4-year-old daughter’s birthday.
The mom regularly documents her kids’ lives on her YouTube channel.
According to the Sun, she shares the lives of her kids — Leonardo, Romeo, Jerusalem, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Omega, D'Artagnan, Nefertiti, KingJames and Aphrodite — on her channel that has more than 979,000 subscribers. Her vidoes range from the latest smoothie challenge to her extra-large grocery hauls where she loads up four full grocery carts — all vegan, of course.
"We don't usually try new products out, we just leave things because otherwise you're just going to start buying it and that's not a good thing,” she said in one video, according to the Sun.
But the mom recently made waves when she shared about her daughter’s extra-large birthday party.
In a video from February that's recently bubbled up again, the mom said she paid nearly $5,000 for her daughter Aphrodite's fourth birthday party. The bill included three full playsets — two kitchens (a modern kitchen and one that was all pink) and a grocery store. And no, they weren’t cheap.
“I think it came to four-and-a-half thousand American dollars,” the mom said in a second video. “But they can all play with it also” she said — meaning her other kids.
Of course, this price didn't include the rest of Aphrodite’s party, which included pink balloons, cake, and of course, a make-your-own pizza bar.
In the video, Aphrodite checked out her spread in a puffy princess dress.
Unsurprisingly, she loved her new presents.
“We couldn’t decide what gifts to buy Aphrodite for her 4th birthday party so we just bought them all!” the mom wrote in a post on Instagram. “She didn’t know what to do when she saw them.”
Of course — this being the internet and all — people had feelings about the mom’s big spending.
“Very minimalist… why so much (and so much plastic) for just one kid?” one commenter on Instagram asked.
"I thought you lived a minimalist style," someone else pointed out. "I guess one person's minimalism is another person's excess."
Another commenter put it bluntly: "This is way to[o] much stuff for one child…"
Other people thought the bigger the better.
"This is so gorgeous! I watched with a smile the whole time," one person commented.
"I absolutely love it. We also bought a kitchen for our princess for her 4th birthday but 100 times smaller," someone else wrote.
"The pure joy in her eyes made my day," a third commenter added."It was the best! [These] were such creative and thoughtful gifts."
Sure, this is a lot of money to spend, but we think it's best to remember that we all make different parenting choices — or in other words: Not your kid, not your problem.
And really, one commenter on Instagram summed up the only thing we could think about as we watched Aphrodite open her gifts: "Who cleans up the mess?"
