OK, I don’t mean to pick on MamaHen, because she seems like a very nice person who’s just trying to offer some friendly advice, but this is exactly what I’m talking about. You found that with your temperament, your children’s temperaments, and your family situation, you needed more space. Cool. That’s fine. It does not logically follow that the same is true for my or any other family. I shared a bedroom with my sister until I was 16 years old, and we didn’t have a problem with it. Yeah, we fought, but we would have fought if we’d had our own bedrooms too, and in some ways having to share the space forced us to work out our problems more than we would have otherwise.
This idea that if you’re going to have kids, you need a big three-story house with at least four bedrooms, you need a big monster SUV or minivan to cart them around in, and you need to decorate their rooms thematically/buy them new clothes/get them lots of new toys/whatever (I’m riffing off on other people now; I know MamaHen didn’t mention most of this in her post) is what drives me insane.
We live simply. We’re going to raise our children to do the same. We probably won’t be living in an apartment forever, but when we do move, it’s still not going to be into a huge house with lots of bedrooms. That’s just not the kind of thing I want to spend my money on. I know that’s hard for a lot of people to accept, but I really wish they’d just deal with it and leave us alone and stop pestering us about when we’re going to move into a big house with more bedrooms than we have family members.
This illustrates my thinking exactly - no matter how much room you have it’s never enough, so why bother going huge when you can live in a smaller place that’s much easier to clean, doesn’t cost as much to own or rent, doesn’t cost as much to heat or cool, and so on?
I’m certainly not advocating raising two girls in a studio apartment, but I think the law of diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly with regards to house size.
I see more info is needed here. I live in military housing. The three stories consist of living room one on level, kitchen and dining room on one level and three bedrooms on the third level. It’s pretty tiny even though it’s three stories.
MsWhatsit, my apologies, more information is needed for you as well. My small truck was bought just before we were pregnant and a second car seat could NOT fit into it. Because we were upside down in the payments all we could afford to get was a mini-van because of the rebate the van offered. We now drive a CRV though because I just like it.
I was going to raise my kids simply too. My children know the joys of gardening and growing their own veggies but still in the last month I found myself buying 50 pieces of chalk and scooters so they can play with the other kids. If you realize it or not now with a 17 month old, you have more stuff than you had as just a couple. It just gets bigger and more insane with another child. Potty training alone filled a whole room in my house. I find attitudes like yours amusing these days. I wish I still had that certainty about what my life would be like. Every day is an adventure for me and I just follow to see where it goes, that’s the beauty of having little ones. Good luck to sticking to your guns, be sure to let us know how that goes honey.
No offense intended, MamaHen, but how did potty training take an entire room? I know what base housing is like but how much room does a potty chair take? MsWhatsit, I feel your pain. My wife and I have a rather small two bedroom apartment/duplex. It’s tiny but it has a fenced-in front yard our children (3 1/2 and 18 months) can play in and it’s cheap. Despite three aunts and a grandmother who love to spoil them, we’ve found a little space planning goes a long way concerning toy and clothing storage.
As for cars, we’ve got a 1991 Honda Civic 2-door and a 1996 Jeep Cherokee 4-door. My wife uses the Civic during the week*, including hauling the kids around and the four of us use it on the weekend.
*Before anybody asks, I use the Cherokee to commute because it not uncommon for me to deliver customer orders and you can’t fit a 42" Plasma screen into a Civic)
I have to agree that the “honey” from MamaHen was really uncalled for, even if there is a fundamental disagreement on this issue. I think MsWhatsit might be understood by some to have an “unrealistic” attitude if she wasn’t a mom yet, but she’s had real-world experience and she obviously already knows about how much stuff having a kid can bring into her life. Give her a little freaking credit, hunh?
That said I personally did up my nursery very decorator-ish (but not matchy-matchy with everything bought from the same pattern) and loved doing it. It isn’t for everyone though to do that and really, so long as baby is loved, fed warm and dry it’ll be fine.
Mr. Twiddle and the Liddle Twiddle and I are moving out of our 3 bedroom apartment into a (smaller in square footage) 3 bedroom house later this month. We plan on having at least 2 more kids, but will stay in this house at least until the next kid is a toddler, and they will share a room. I think it is good for kids to learn to share, and besides we co-sleep for the first 5 or 6 months anyway.
I don’t feel the same as folks who get fed up at the well-meaning questions (when are you due? is it a boy or a girl?) because those really are nothing more than social niceties, and you may as well rant about the “have a nice day” you get from the cashier at Safeway. Besides with the huge belly I had and the joy I took in my pregnancy I personally would have been miffed if people didn’t ask. I loved the attention and woulda happily had more!
Oh, Twiddle, I basically agree about the extremely common “social nicety” questions. I don’t blame the individual askers, or expect them to come up with more interesting questions to ask (although that might be nice). It’s just that I feel a general annoyance at having to answer them over, and over, and over again. I don’t think there’s a real solution to the problem, short of snapping at people and telling them not to talk to me for the entire nine months of my pregnancy, and I think that’s a bit extreme.
MamaHen, I too am a bit bewildered at how potty training took up an entire room. Whatsit Jr. has a potty chair already, which we’ve stuck alongside the “big people” toilet in the bathroom just so he can get used to it. It’s really not all that space-consuming. As for the rest of your post, well, again, it’s attitudes like yours that are exactly what I’m talking about. You seem to have taken some kind of personal offense in my desire to live with my family in a small space and without a whole lot of stuff. Please believe me when I reiterate, yet again: My lifestyle is not a challenge to you, or anyone else. You live the life you choose. Buy a big house. Devote an entire room just to potty training. Spend a bunch of money on toys and baby stuff and whatever else you like. I don’t care. That’s your money, your life, and your decision. What I don’t get is why my having made a different decision seems to somehow upset you. (And all the other people who give me grief about this on a semi-regular basis. Mom-in-law, I’m looking at you.)
My SIL, who’s about age 40 now, grew up with her 13 brothers and sisters (yes, 14 kids) and her parents in a three-bedroom farmhouse. The 9 girls shared one bedroom and the 5 boys another; the parents got a room all to themselves. She’s a lovely, intelligent, happy woman, still very close to her whole family. Clearly she did NOT have a deprived childhood. She loved it, and sees nothing whatsoever remarkable about it.
My sister and I shared a room till we were in high school. It was FUN. I never felt deprived – although at one point my sister DID draw a line across the floor that my stuff wasn’t allowed to cross. I can’t blame her, she was a neat freak and I was a slob. But that’s how you learn to live with people!!!
