I'm a very logical, literal, realist person. I have difficulty believing things against reason, physics, experience, and judgment. Therefore, a couple of years ago I had decided to have 1 or 2 children at specific times due to various reasons. Michael and I got married September 2007, therefore I had planed that we would start to try to get pregnant in September 2008 and then again in exactly 3 years. I started to plan other things about this situation - such as how many bedrooms we would need in our house, how to set up an account for a child's education, etc. I knew the cost estimate of raising a child today was $250,000 from birth - 18 and determined that we could possible afford 2 children and even that would be hard.
And then I watched a tv show called "The Duggars" about a family with 17 children (and #18 on the way) on discovery health. It was just an hour long tv show about a family and the reality of choosing not to use birth control. I couldn't believe my eyes. Not only did these children seem happy (despite their lack of name brand clothing) but they were a strong family that loves God. I started to read books about large families and used google to do some small scale research. I couldn't believe the end result. I found that I didn't want to use birth control but just wanted to let whatever happens happen and then Michael and I had several long talks about it.
That was 10 months ago and now it is September 2008, the month that I had originally planned to start trying for a baby. I don't know why we haven't gotten pregnant yet. I don't know what will happen if all of a sudden we start conceiving easily and rapidly. As a realist, I must admit that at any moment I might feel the need to go back on birth control.
So this leads me back to the bunk bed blessing-what I talked about on my last blog. Once I started realizing that we could have a big family, I had several reality checks. What about college tuition? What about the looks of others in the grocery store? How will I be able to feed them? Where in the heck would more than 2 children sleep, if we only have 2 children bedrooms in our house?
A large family isn't going to be complete fulfillment in life, but having dialog open with my husband and reading the Bible does fulfill me. Although I gave up birth control a while ago and did assume I'd have a baby by now, it hasn't been the emotional roller coaster that one might assume. I feel content with whatever happens, happens. I'm happy with my life the way that it is and at the same time, feel that it would be a blessing to fill our bunk beds up with kids. Either way is cool. We just keep praying that God would stitch together our family, be it thru biological or adoption, that it would just be done at his time.
1 comment:
Have you seen John and Kate plus 8 on TLC? Are you looking into adoption now too? Big plans for you and Michael. It is great that you two talk about stuff like this.
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