It’s always a little weird to go back home after moving out and starting your own life – something even Jinger Duggar is all too familiar with. During this week’s episode of the Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, she opened up about her recent visit home to Arkansas and how “strange” she felt being back in Jim Bob and Michelle‘s house again after so much has changed.
Jinger, husband Jeremy Vuolo, and their three children visited her family back home in June, and although she said the trip was “so exciting,” it was also “overwhelming” at times – partly because having such a big family means having a lot of people to plan time with.
“There are a couple siblings who live away now, just a few. And when you live away from family and then you come back, everybody wants to see you,” she said. “Everybody wants to connect with you, and it can be so tough to juggle all that.”
They ended up spending a lot of time at her parents’ house – which Jinger and her siblings refer to as “the Big House” – because it’s big enough to accommodate anyone who might have wanted to stop by and see them.
The changes that have been made there recently were immediately obvious to Jinger, the first being how clean it is without so many kids running around making messes.
“It’s like, perfectly clean. Typically, when you walk into the Big House, it’s kinda messy,” she explained on the podcast. “We would clean the house every night and it would be spotless, ready to go. But when you walk in at, like, 2 p.m. on a weekday and the house is clean, I thought, ‘OK, this is a different season of life.’ Because you have maybe five kids who live there now and they’re all grown … so that’s strange.”
These days, the youngest kid in Jim Bob and Michelle’s house is 15-year-old Josie, so the time when toys would be scattered everywhere is long behind them.
But despite the strangeness, Jinger said she had fun – and that it was “kinda wild” to see her youngest siblings turning into adults.
“I love seeing how [my younger siblings have] grown and matured, what they’re into now,” she shared on the podcast. “Because when I left, that was a long time ago … and those little kids are all grown up. It’s hard for me to picture the little kids as teenagers and as adults now.”
