Joy-Anna Duggar Says Motherhood Is 'Harder Than I Thought'

Guess it’s not as easy as it looks! Though Joy-Anna Duggar grew up in a home with 18 other kids and watched mom Michelle Duggar go through it all, it turns out she isn’t actually an expert yet. In a new clip from Counting On, she’s talking about her experience with motherhood as she learns how to raise her son Gideon with husband Austin Forsyth. Though she has plenty of experience taking care of little ones, namely her own brothers and sisters, it turns out that having a baby of your own is a quite a bit different.

“Being a mom is in a lot of ways easier than I thought and in a lot of ways harder than I thought,” she shares with the camera in the clip below. “I knew that my mom had gone through a lot with all of us kids, but like I didn’t think it was that hard just because I’d always taken care of kids myself. But it’s given me a whole new appreciation for moms out there that have kids.”

For Austin, it was even more of a learning curve. He didn’t have the same experience Joy did of helping raise his younger siblings, and so it was pretty much his first time being totally responsible for a baby. And doing it without much help from Joy as she recovered from the birth made things even harder. “I hadn’t really ever changed a diaper before we had Gideon,” he admits in the clip. “And then with Joy’s C-section, and her being kinda bed-ridden and just not really being able to get out of bed much… She probably changed maybe five diapers the first two weeks. So [it was] like diaper boot camp. I got broke in.”

Their brother-in-law Jeremy Vuolo is also learning diaper changing the hard way with his new daughter Felicity. He even gave himself a nickname in honor of his new daddy-duty responsibilities. “With newborn Felicity here, @Jeremy_Vuolo says he is now ‘Meconium Man.’ #DaddySuperhero #DiaperDuty,” Jessa Duggar‘s husband Ben Seewald shared on Twitter. Looks like having a baby of your own is a learning experience for all of the Duggars, no matter how hands on they may have been with Josie and Jordyn back in the day. In the Duggar house, they always had a whole team of siblings to lean on. Now, it’s just on the married couple. But at least they can always invite Jana Duggar over to help. Arguably, she’s got the most experience raising kids of them all.