There is a reason I ran that poll in the sidebar. I’ll explain in a second but let’s show the results first.
Thanks to everybody that voted. Here are the final tallies:
2 kids – 10 votes
1 kid – 6 votes
3 kids – 6 votes
4 or more kids – 4 votes
0 kids – 2 votes
Two wins the poll in a landslide.
Anyway, I was thinking about family size after reading the post on Babylune called Coming to Terms with Family Size and Fertility.
With the new baby on the way, we don’t really have to deal with anything that Pookie or Geetle are working on being “the last time they ever…” yet. But, we could have. Before deciding to try getting pregnant again, we spent months trying to decide what we wanted to do. Actually, at at one point we had decided to stop paying on the frozen embryos and stop at two kids.
Before ever getting pregnant the first time, I had wanted two kids. I come from a family of two kids. BeAGoodMom had wanted three. She came from a family of three. After having the twins, we had kind of decided that two was fine. I think the difficulties of getting pregnant through IVF helped BeAGoodMom decide that two would be enough.
Twins are a little different than having two different aged children. BeAGoodMom started realizing that even though we have two kids, we were not really going to get the older/younger sibling relationships. It took me a couple weeks, but then I started to realize that I wanted that, too. I can already tell we made the right decision by how often Geetle just has to hug the baby (BeAGoodMom’s belly) when she gets bummed or before she goes to sleep and how much fun Pookie has whenever he sees some of his old toys, videos and books getting dragged back out.
Being infertile is also going to make it very easy to never have more than 3 kids. After the last IVF cycle, we had exactly one frozen embryo left. We have already donated the embryo to research and therefore have no opportunity to get pregnant again unless we go through another round of egg retrievals which just isn’t going to happen.
I’ll be starting a new poll tomorrow (or this morning if you go to bed like a normal person). There is huge breaking news about the name for the baby. I’ll have a post and a poll explaining all the details around lunchtime tomorrow if you happen to be eating lunch in the central time zone.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I am eagerly awaiting the breaking news….. I will check later….
When my parents had their third child the doctors informed my mom that she should stop having kids since all three of her children had been delivered by caesarian. Back in the day the c-section method was a lot harder on moms and the uterine wall and having more kids would have been pushing their luck, according to the docs.
My folks always wanted a large family and my mom particularly wanted a girl. All of their kids were boys so both the number and gender mix were a bit of a disappointment to them. They solved that problem by going the route of adopting more children to fill out our family to its current size.
My folks have raised 14 children, three of them home made, 11 adopted. I’m the second oldest. My adopted brothers and sisters are from mixed races, several from outside of the country and several with physical challenges. When you have 8 or more kids and want to adopt more the adoption agencies will only offer you special needs kids, some with severe physical challenges. All were adopted as infants, except Adam, who came home from an orphanage in Vietnam at the age of 2.
We always knew when mom was going to get the itch to add a new kid to our family, it was about the time when the youngest started to stop being a baby. The real surprises were when, through weird issues with adoption agencies, we would end up with two kids the same age at the same time. So we had the twin experience with a couple of my sisters and with a pair of my brothers.
My wife and I have 4 kids and have made the decision to stop there. But I can well understand why you’d feel the pull to have another, just to watch the cycle of sibling behavior develop. It’s a great thing to get to watch.
Todd, that is a wild story. My mom is the youngest of nine and my dad is part of 6. I can’t imagine trying to wrangle that many kids together or being that responsible for that many kids with all of the activities that kids do that parents have to interact with in some way. I seriously will start having trouble with keeping the two girls’ names straight.