Ready To Feel Old? The Gosselin Sextuplets Just Turned 18
The little tots made famous in 'Jon & Kate Plus Eight' are now officially adults.
You may remember them as the best birth control you never asked for. The Gosselin sextuplets — Hannah, Collin, Aaden, Joel, Leah and Alexis — who came to fame on the show Jon & Kate Plus Eight, celebrated their 18th birthdays on May 10.
The show ran from 2007-2009, beginning when the sextuplets were toddlers, and also featured their older twin sisters Madelyn and Cara, as well as their overwhelmed parents. A spin-off of the show, Kate Plus 8, ran in fits and starts until 2017, when the sextuplets were around 13.
Jon and Kate divorced in 2009. Two of the sextuplets, Hannah and Colin, currently live in Pennsylvania with their dad, while the other four kids live in North Carolina with Kate. Twins Madelyn and Cara, 21, are off at college.
Hannah celebrated this milestone birthday in high style, traveling to Miami with her father. She arrived at her party in a rented Rolls Royce with an all-orange interior that she described as a “dream car” on Entertainment Tonight.
“My four best friends joined me down there and we threw this big birthday thing at The Sugar Factory,” Hannah told ET. She said that she’s excited to be able to vote, drive her car out of state, and officially launch her own business, a skincare line.
Being 18 also means that she’ll have access to the money she earned from her very early reality TV career.
“I don’t know how much it is,” Hannah said to ET. “I’ve always said that when I do get the money I’m going to use it to pay for my college.”
Without naming specific institutions, Hannah told Us about her college list, “all the schools are in Florida.”
While Jon and Kate’s split was not amicable, Hannah described her current relationship with her mom to ET as “stable,” and involving an “average” amount of texts and calls between mother and daughter. She did add, “I miss my siblings.”
Jon told ET, “I wish she could’ve celebrated with her other siblings, but as time has gone on there has been alienation because of Kate.” He added, “there are difficult times we have gone through in the past but we’re here today.”
Of his youngest children officially entering adulthood, the dad said, “now it’s time for me to move on, dating . . . it’s like starting over, pretty much.”
"I wish they could have been with me so we could all celebrate turning 18 together," Hannah said of her other siblings to InTouch Weekly. "I know they would be really proud of me."
Reproductive medicine has made significant advances since 2004, and higher-order multiples like the Gosselin sextuplets are now much more rare. Better pre-transfer testing allows doctors to use fewer embryos in IVF cycles, and in the medicated IUI cycles responsible for the Gosselin sextuplets and most other cases of higher order multiples, families often opt for selective reduction, which reduces a pregnancy to a safer number of fetuses. With all that said, record-breaking nonuplets just celebrated their first birthday — before the c-section, doctor thought there were “only” seven babies.
