Before Josh and I got married we talked about babies (how many we'd like, how excited we were to have them, what their names would be, whose version of blue eyes they'd have- mine are blue with rays, his are blue with "snowflakes") and we were always extremely excited about it! There was never a question as to whether we wanted to have children or not, there were only a million questions about when.
After we got engaged we started talking about it more seriously. There are a lot of pros and cons to weigh when you decided when to start your family. A few of the big ones are finances, living arrangements, jobs and future plans. I, being the jump-right-in/make every decision based on your emotions kind of person that I am, skipped over all of those considerations and only considered the raging baby rabies that I've had basically since puberty. My husband, being the practical/objective person that he is, brought my feet back solidly to the ground.
Finances: Other than our house we have no debt. No credit cards, no car payments, no student loans (we finished paying his off last summer and I didn't have any). We have a solid emergency fund.
Living Arrangements: We own our home. The only catch is that this house is "temporary." It's in a town that we don't love and don't really feel safe in. We have plans to move to the town where all of our parents live and we really wanted to be able to move into a raise the babies in this house kind of house. That means more than 2 bedrooms, a good school district and an area where mommy (someday me) will be comfortable being home with babies while daddy (someday Josh) is at work and not able to protect us. Josh felt strongly about saving a good amount for a down payment on this house before we started trying for kiddos so we decided to start working on that.
Jobs: We both have steady, well-paying jobs. Once we have kids we both are determined for me to be a stay at home mom though. Josh's job is good and the pay is good but it would be pretty tight if I wasn't working and we had another mouth to feed. We decided to start saving little by little so that we could have a cushion for when I'm not working after the baby. When we discussed these plans we decided to take this a little at a time put our more aggressive saving efforts toward saving for the down payment on a new house.
We also took into consideration the fact that I was diagnosed with PCOS at the age of 16 and I probably wouldn't be able to get pregnant right away.
After considering all of this we decided to wait for about 2 years after the wedding before we started trying for babies. If something big changed in our lives during that time, no biggie, we'd just re-evaluate.
We planned on practicing Natural Family Planning to prevent a pregnancy until we'd accomplished some of the changes we wanted to make pre-children.
Then we realized that our honeymoon fell during my "magic" time....And we did nothing about it.
3 weeks later we got a positive pregnancy test and all of our plans changed.
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