There’s a reason House Rules‘ NSW couple Mandy and Toad wanted to have children before they married – they wanted their kids to be at their wedding!
“We don’t need to follow tradition,” Mandy, 28, explains. “We’re not like that – and we thought it would be cute to have our own little kids walk down the aisle before me.”
Toad, a dairy farmer, and Mandy, a beauty therapist, became engaged just nine months after meeting.
“It was a bit of a joke,” Mandy remembers. “I’d say, ‘Put a ring on it,’ and he’d say, ‘Give me a kid.’ We had this little bartering system.”
Toad proposed to Mandy in January 2016.
“The day he proposed was so exciting,” Mandy recalls. “But I remember thinking that night, ‘Holy s**t, now I’ve got to go off the pill!’ Two weeks later, I was pregnant.”
The couple are now parents to twins Lenny and Layla. Toad, 32, would love to have more kids – ideally, “a dozen”, all up.
“I’d love a footy team,” he grins. “I’d love heaps.”
Mandy isn’t quite so sure.
“I just want to do the best at raising the two we’ve got,” she says.
As for the wedding, the couple have it all planned out.
“We know where we’ll be for the reception and ceremony,” Mandy explains. “We just haven’t booked it.”
The House Rules fan-favourites are still trying to decide how old they want Lenny and Layla to be on the big day.
“First of all we said, ‘Oh, when they can walk – we’d like them to walk up the aisle in front of us,'” Mandy says.
“But now that they’re walking, I’m like, ‘Nup, maybe when they’re two [in September].”
