But there's been moments where we've had to hide our children in a bedroom, and it feels like a scene from Sound of Music, you know.' we're now on our third set of downstairs neighbors, but when our two preceding neighbors were moving, they asked us to hide the fact that we had children from prospective buyers, and the only polite thing to do, really, is to hide your existence so you can trick the next set of downstairs neighbors. But if you could imagine living under five little kids, it's a crisis. 'In an urban setting, when you live in an apartment building, you hear everything.

Ten years ago I couldn't get a date, and now my apartment's crawling with babies - I don't know what happened. So I, you know, married Jeannie, and she loved children, and I loved her, and I was terrified of it. 'I'm a comedian, which is the opposite of a lifestyle that equips you to be a parent. On ending up with five children in Manhattan Living in New York is difficult enough, and attempting to raise five kids that don't end up heroin addicts on the Bowery is pretty ambitious.' 'I've had people say, 'What, do you own an oil company? I mean, why would you subject yourself to that?' And I always just tell them I'm creating my own nationality,' he tells NPR's Scott Simon.

And it's about the challenge, complexity and pleasure of raising a large family in a small apartment. He's now written a book, the title of which comes from one of his children: Dad Is Fat. Jim Gaffigan is a widely acclaimed and traveled comedian - or, as his son once put it, 'a stand-up chameleon' - who may be best-known for his routines about American food, like the misery that comes with eating Hot Pockets. But nothing may attract more surprise in the neighborhood than a Midwestern couple and their five children. It's a neighborhood that quite proudly abounds with hipsters, swingers, adults-only shops, men in high heels, and people who mutter to themselves on the street. The comedian and actor lives with his wife, Jeannie Noth Gaffigan, and five children - that's not a typo - in a two-bedroom apartment in lower Manhattan.

Dad is fat gaffigan