Sue Radford gave birth to her first child back in 1989 when she was only 14 (don’t worry, they were both underaged, and it was consensual), and in the following decades, more and more rugrats were born, almost one after another. In total, Ms. Redford was pregnant for more than 800 weeks of her life.
In 2020, Sue and her husband Noel became the happiest parents on the planet, as that’s when they brought little Heidi – their 22nd child – into the world, finally restoring the balance between boys and girls.
Even the pesky COVID-19 pandemic was not enough to prevent the couple from having a new baby daughter, even though they both swear they did not plan for her. Sue’s most recent labor lasted for over 10 hours, and on the opposite end of that is her daughter Bonnie, who took only 12 minutes. The British supermom called the birth of her 22nd child “the strangest of all births” due to it taking place amid the global pandemic.
Sue was more scared than ever before because it’s such a huge, unpredictable factor for the newborn. She was worried that Noel, her husband, wouldn’t be allowed to keep her company in the hospital, and after that, the doctors kept the mother and her baby for much longer than usual because of the ongoing quarantine. After spending that much time in the hospital, the parents of the largest family in Great Britain remembered that their 11th daughter had not been properly named yet.
Even though Sue had previously vowed that their 20th child would be the last, the facts speak for themselves. Naturally, the supermom said that Heidi would be her last child, but 48 is still a pretty young age. The firstborn, Christopher, is now 33 years old and has two children of his own. The eldest daughter, Sophie, is 29 years old and the mother of three. So as you can tell, the family business is booming!
The whole Radford family lives in a former nursing home for the elderly in Morecambe. The house is quite large, with ten big bedrooms, but as you can imagine, fitting 20+ people in there is not ideal. Noel Redford has a small bakery in which older children help him bake bread for sale and for making sandwiches. The biggest hurdle for the super mom in all this is surprisingly not the lack of rooms or money but laundry. And yes, when you think about doing laundry for 20 people, it does sound like a hellish chore.
However, neither Sue nor Noel are complaining. They love each of their kids with all their hearts and no matter how old they are. Will there be a child #23 in the future? I’d bet there would, but even if they stop at 22, it’s still a heck of a feat!