My kids were both very much planned, although they didn’t follow the plan to the letter. Mr. Legend and I had both always wanted kids “someday”, but I was 20 when we got married and I knew that I was too young to be a good mom (that’s me - I know other people who were great parents at that age). We also wanted to wait until we were financially secure and our lives were completely in order before we brought a child into the world.
Seven years later, we were still not really financially secure and our lives weren’t really in any noticeable order, but I started wanting a baby really, really badly. We looked at things and realized that we would most likely never be completely “ready” and decided to just have one anyway, since we were emotionally ready and not in terrible financial shape. Having been compulsive about using birth control all my (sexual) life, I kind of had the impression that all I had to do was quit using it and I’d immediately get pregnant. This was, as most of you know, a false impression. It took us the better part of a year to get pregnant, which in retrospect wasn’t bad at all.
We’d always known that we both wanted two children, and we wanted to have them about two and a half years apart. I’d heard enough stories about people who assumed they’d take as long to conceive the second time as the first, only to wind up having their kids far closer together than they wanted, so we waited until the first one was a year and a half old to start trying for the second one. A year later, at the appointment I’d made to start investigating why I hadn’t conceived, my gynecologist confirmed that I was pregnant, and our girls are three and a half years apart. People used to ask me if we were going to have a third child to “try for a boy”, but I was always more than a little offended by the idea that girls weren’t good enough. Also, although I probably did think we’d have one of each at one time, I can’t even imagine having any children but my girls now.
We did think about having a third child twice. While I was pregnant the second time, the AFP test came back low and the doctor recommended I have an amniocentesis to check for Down Syndrome. While we were waiting for that, Mr. Legend and I talked about what would happen if we had a disabled child, and we thought that if we did, it might be good to have a third one so that our oldest child wouldn’t end up having to care for her sibling all alone after we died. In retrospect, we were getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Then, when our younger daughter (healthy and intact and everything any parent could wish for) was not quite two and I was still breastfeeding a little, I started to think that I really wanted to have just one more child. Mr. Legend never got on board with this idea, my friends thought I was nuts (my most outspoken friend: “Why do you want a third? You can’t handle the two you’ve got!”), and the urge passed almost on the day that I finally weaned my toddler. Hormones are crazy, crazy things.
We’re very happy with our two daughters and I’ve never seriously wished I had more (or, certainly, fewer). And now that we’re looking at what college costs, I’m really grateful we kept it to two.