What advice would the Derricos give their younger selves?

The Derricos are back on TLC (DStv channel 135) and we caught up with super-parents Deon and Karen Derrico to uncover the advise they would give themselves from 20 years ago.

Read on to see what they had to say.

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Deon: First, I wish I could tell myself that I was going to have 14 children, so I could have even more prepared than we are. I think we’re pretty prepared.

Karen: Stock up on some sleep.

Deon: Do a lot of more vacationing.

Karen: Yeah.

Deon: We enjoy what we do, but I think I would have loved to have been even more prepared. As parents, we feel that we are not as prepared, once we finally have a child, I think every parent fears that. I would definitely tell myself to just sit back and chill, and know that I do have it together. And I just would have made a lot of more preparations for having such a large family. We didn’t have Darian until I was 35 years of age. So I look at all the time that I wasted money and everything, and I wish I had done a better job managing it. Having a large amount of children, financial stability is always at the forefront of that. We’ve never had any problems with it, thank God, but there’s still other things I wish I would have accomplished with it, so that would be mine.

Karen: We joke and say get more sleep, become more organised and ready for it as we think we can become with it. But I think I would just tell myself that it’s going to be fine. The times that I went through the miscarriages, looking now at the blessings that we have, I wish I would have told myself to just relax and calm down. But at that moment, you just don’t know. You don’t know what the outcome is ever going to be, so you stressed out. What I’m telling myself right now, looking forward, is enjoy these moments. They are growing so fast. Enjoy these moments and continue your close bond with all of your children.

Deon: I would also like to tell myself, when my wife and I suffered our first couple of miscarriages, that we would get past that, and we would be here. So my message to all parents, or potential parents that are trying to have children, is to really not give up because we were right there. We had 2 miscarriages prior to having Darian, so we didn’t think that. The first one (miscarriage), of course, threw us off and then we had the second one about a year later. We started to believe that we would never be able to have children. We really understand the pain that many people face who may be still trying, they may have even had more miscarriages than we’ve had.

If you could build your fantasy house together as a family, what are some of the rooms that you would include now?

Deon: You don’t have enough time for us to give you those details! We would have 14 bedrooms. We will have a 2500 square foot laundry room alone. I would like to have a shower outside the house for coming into the house, because I have OCD and I can’t stand those types of dirt inside the house. I want a RV garage, state of the art classroom. We could go...

Karen: Mother-in-law suites, we need 2 or 3 of them.

Deon: We also need a suite just for people to visit.

Karen: About 10 acres of land.

Deon: About 20 acres of land, we could go on and on...

Finally, will we be meeting anyone new this season?

Deon: You won’t be meeting anyone new, but you will be meeting something new. There is something new that you will be able to see this season. You have to stay tuned and it’s going to be exciting. Let me think of a good hint. A good hint would be, it consumes food. It consumes food.

Watch Doubling Down With The Derricos S2, Wednesdays on TLC (DStv channel 135) at 21:00

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