The two new Jolie-Pitt kids — a boy, Knox Leon, weighing 5.03 pounds, and a girl, Vivienne Marcheline, weighing 5 pounds even — began their journey last night (i.e., Saturday) at Lenval Hospital (57, avenue de la Californie, northeast of the airport) in Nice. Obstetrician Michael Sussman delivered the twins. Brad and Angie now have six kids — the adopted Maddox, 6, Pax, 4, and Zahara, 3, plus the au natural Shiloh, 2, and the twins.

My interest is in Chateau Miraval, the $70 million dollar, 35-room estate near Aix en Provence which they’re reportedly intending to lease for three years. Who needs 35 rooms? Little kids always share bedrooms, Brad and Angie will share a room with the twins plus..what, a nanny and a couple of assistants? They could all probably make do with a ten-room mansion. Fifteen might be a wee bit extravagant. Twenty would be, like…whoa, take it easy. But thirty-five friggin’ rooms?
This isn’t my business but everyone is in everyone else’s face these days so why not? I’m talking about passing along decent values to your kids. I realize that Chateau Miraval is a working wine vineyard so you need facilities for the guys who work it, but it’s not a good thing to instruct your children through day-to-day experience that nouveau riche extravagance is the norm. Even if you pass along the best kind of emotional and spiritual upbringing by your words and deeds, an opulent lifestyle will always create a sense of swagger and entitlement and a nonstop litany of lusts and appetites.
The best thing you can do is give your kids to a natural, non-flamboyant, modestly-scaled life. They should have love and comfort and occasional perks, but mainly within the framework of a life based upon need and nutrition and not whimsical indulgence. Brad and Angie’s kids’ life should not be about what they’d like to taste or fuck around with or splash around in on a daily whim because their parents are loaded and “why not?” The Jolie-Pits are doing their kids no favors by bringing them up this way. 99% of the world lives in a world of limits and natural proportion.