The largest family in Britain has announced that it is to swell by one more member, when the newest addition is born next April.

Sue Radford and husband Noel are already parents to 16 children and are now expecting baby number 17, just 11 months after their last child, son Caspar was born. They rose to fame when they were featured on the documentary ’15 Kids and Counting’ on Channel 4 in 2011.

The family lives in a former children’s home in Morecambe, Lancashire, and uses a minibus to get around. The children – Chris, 24, Sophie, 19, Chloe, 18, Jack, 16, Daniel, 14, Luke, 12, Millie, 12, Katie, 10, James, nine, Ellie, eight, Aimee, seven, Josh, five, Max, four, Tillie, three, Oscar, two and Casper, 11 months – are all said to be “absolutely thrilled” about their new sibling.

Mrs Radford announced the news on her Facebook page, with the Telegraph reporting her as saying: “We are so excited to announce Radford baby 17 will be joining this family in April. As you can imagine, the children are so excited. Little Tilly said to me: ‘Mummy you have a baby in your tummy’. It was so sweet.”

The Radfords are not the only large family in Britain – Derek and Debbie Simpson, from East Kilbride, have 13 children, while a family in Dundee has 12 children.

Lucky number 13?

A couple from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has welcomed their twelfth son, Tucker – yet again failing to break the gender streak that has made the family famous.

Jay and Kateri Schwandt believed that their twelfth child may be a girl, as Kateri went nine days over her due date, something that had not happened with any of their previous 11 boys. However, Kateri – known as Teri – gave birth to another boy, Tucker, who weighed in at 3.52kg, at a Grand Rapids hospital.

Teri, 38, told The Associated Press: “Of course. There was a chuckle in the whole room. I looked at my husband, and we exchanged a knowing smile. When they say it’s a boy, I think, OK, no problem. I’ve got this. We know what we’re doing.”

The family now has 12 boys aged between 21 and newborn. Devout Roman Catholics who don’t believe in using birth control, the Schwandts come from large families themselves – Teri has 13 siblings and has a sister who is mother to 10 children, all of whom are also boys.

Dr. Bob Barbieri, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told the news source: “That’s amazing. This is a miracle. It appears there is some type of genetic determination in some families that have a lot of girls or a lot of boys. It’s not well understood. It’s more than a statistical oddity.”

Lips.

A New Zealand-based woman accidentally superglued her lips together when she mistakenly applied the glue instead of her lip cream.

The Dunedin resident, 64, reached for what she thought was lip cream in the dark in the middle of the night, and was horrified to discover that it was in fact superglue.

According to the Otago Daily Times, the woman was only able to make grunting sounds on the phone when she called the emergency services to come and help her out of her predicament.

Senior Sergeant Steve Aitken told the publication: “[The] ambulance received a call, but due to the muffled speech, they were unsure whether it was a medical event or whether someone had been gagged.

“Basically, she could only grunt. She got up in the middle of the night, in the dark, and grabbed what she thought was the tube of medication”, Senior Sergeant Aitken went on to say.

As a result of the grunting sound, ambulance staff alerted police who then went directly to the woman’s home. She was admitted to hospital where she received treatment to unglue her lips, and has now been discharged.