Joy-Anna Duggar and her husband, Austin Forsyth, often find it difficult to keep up with her extended — and expansive — family.
“It’s hard,” Joy-Anna, 27, said on the Wednesday, March 19, episode of sister Jinger’s eponymous podcast with her husband, Jeremy Vuolo. “I live, probably, 35-ish minutes from everybody that lives in Arkansas. It’s definitely hard to keep up with all the siblings because … if we had one sibling over [for] a week, it would take 19 weeks to get through everybody. That’s a lot of time that goes by.”
Joy-Anna and Jinger, 31, are two of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children, many of whom have since left the nest and gone on to get married and have families of their own. (Joy-Anna and Forsyth, 31, got married in 2017 before welcoming children together.)
According to Joy-Anna, many of the siblings independently gravitate toward one another.
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“I think we naturally connect with some more than others,” Joy-Anna said of her siblings’ relationships. “Whether we go to church together, we’ll see them or whatever, and then some of us, I’m just really close to a couple of the sisters-in-law, so we see each other quite a bit [and] working out together. It is harder to stay connected to everybody, but I feel like we all have a good expectation for everybody. We don’t feel pressure, like, ‘We have to do this together’ or, ‘I haven’t talked to this person this week.’”
She continued, “I have my own family to take care of, and so it’s hard to balance how much do I reach out [and] how much do I not. I want to spend time with all of the siblings.”
Joy-Anna further revealed that “once every six months,” she and Forsyth will host one of her siblings at their home.
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“We’ll rotate, so every six months, we’ll have, whatever, Joe and Kendra [Duggar] over or we’ll have another sibling over, or we’ll go to their house,” she said. “It’s definitely hard because we all have our own friend groups, church or birthday parties. … It’s not, like, we all hang out all the time.”
For Joy-Anna and Forsyth, they’ve grown their “community” with outside friends.
“We do have our church family and a lot of close friends now,” she said on Wednesday’s episode. “Now that we’ve grown our community over the last few years, we don’t see the family as much as we used to just ‘cause we’re busy and then we try and safeguard a few days just for us a week.”
