Family has always been super important to me.\u00a0 I grew up in a rather small family.\u00a0 I have 1 sister and only 3 cousins (the eldest of which is actually older than the other two\u2019s dad).\u00a0 My younger cousins grew up in the same area so we spent a lot of time together including all major holidays so we are all very close.<\/p>\n
I always knew I wanted a large family of my own.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what I would do without the close family support I\u2019ve had my entire life and want to make sure my children have that as well.\u00a0 No number of friends in the world replaces the unconditional, never wavering love of family that I\u2019ve been fortunate enough to have.<\/p>\n
So, I married an only child.\u00a0 Though hubby has many more cousins than me, he didn\u2019t grow up with as close a relationship with them as I did.\u00a0 So, as you can imagine, the importance of family in my sense and experience is lost on him.\u00a0 Having grown up spending his time running alone through the woods and sharing his free time with the myriad of pets his family has always had, the concept of siblings is lost on him.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t understand, at all, the dynamics of how our girls get along and it\u2019s really hard to explain to him because it is so beyond anything he\u2019s ever known.<\/p>\n
He too always wanted a family but his idea has always been slightly different than mine.\u00a0 When we were still in college and conversations about \u201clife\u201d would come up, I would tease him about wanting to have a whole farm full of children (think Duggar size\u2026).\u00a0 While I would love to have an unlimited number of children, I know the reality of it is beyond our capacity as parents.\u00a0 So I settled on wanting 4 children.<\/p>\n
If you ask me, 4 is the perfect number.\u00a0 My sister and I didn\u2019t get along well as older children and it would have been nice to have a \u201cfallback\u201d sibling or two especially since we lived out in the middle of nowhere and there weren\u2019t a lot of other children our ages around.\u00a0 Also, have 4 eliminates that \u201cweird\u201d middle child and helps to ensure that no one is left out.<\/p>\n
Hubby?\u00a0 He\u2019d have been happy with just Honeybun.\u00a0 He agreed to having another and again, would have been more than happy with Honeybun\u00a0and Sugarplum.\u00a0 After much negotiating (and him knowing that I would not give up), here we are expecting number 3 and hubby says \u201cWE ARE DONE!\u201d<\/p>\n
I still have this vision of the perfect family of 4 lovely children and can\u2019t imagine leaving Sugarplum as that \u201cawkward\u201d middle child but I also know that 3 is different than 2 and I might change my mind.\u00a0 I know that having 3 children is going to be extremely hard and 4 will be no easier, but I try to focus on the future.<\/p>\n
I think about what life will be like for my children and teenagers and adults.\u00a0 They only have 1 true aunt (though we\u2019ve adopted others) and there is no sign of cousins yet. My children having that close and super supportive family that I grew up with is really important to me and if I have to provide it myself, then I guess that\u2019s just what I\u2019ll do! (Hubby willing, of course!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Family has always been super important to me.\u00a0 I grew up in a rather small family.\u00a0 I have 1 sister and only 3 cousins (the eldest of which is actually older than the other two\u2019s dad).\u00a0 My younger cousins grew up in the same area so we spent a lot of time together including all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baby-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2434,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}