You loose sleep over what???? part 2

Enjoying a walk together

Yesterday, I wrote about the most common question people ask us when they find out that our family homeschools. Today I would like to write a little about the second most common question we get asked. This time it has nothing to do with our family homeschooling, but it has everything about the size of our family. I started hearing it from people when I was pregnant with Little Monkey, but it only happened occasionally. Now that I am pregnant with my fourth child I hear it more often, and Daddy hears it all the time, "What were you thinking having another one?" That's right, it seems that a lot of people are almost offended by us having four kids. I am not talking here about genuine concerns form close relatives about how we are planning to support our family. I am talking about acquaintances, coworkers, and even total strangers feeling the need to let us know that we have crossed some sort of a line by having four kids.
   Not all remarks and questions are offensive and rude, like an elderly couple in a grocery store mentioning that our kids will never "run out" of playmates, or a friend saying that we are working on "starting our own sport team". These are cute and I don't necessarily take offense to them. But some questions from people that hardly know us can be downright inappropriate. When Daddy has had some people ask him if he has not got "fixed" yet, or if he knows what "causes that" I just cringe. When has it become OK to inquire about intimate details of married couple's life. When has asking about the status of your private parts become an acceptable topic for conversation in any other place than drunken frat house? When has it become everyone's business what choices a married pair make as to how many kids they will have?

Helping hand

Love and understanding

   When Daddy and I went on our first date we discussed how many kids we wanted to have; I wanted to have 2 and he wanted to have 4. Since I came from a family of 3 I knew that I definitely didn't want 3 as growing up one of us was always left out. I wanted to have even number of kids. After becoming a mom to Funky Monkey, I wasn't sure I was ready for more. I was really scared to have more and not be able to handle it. But all my worries dissipated after I had Girly Monkey and realized that I can do it. My worst fear, that I would love my son less because I had another child, never came true and I had enough love for both of them. I also realized that I loved being a mom and bringing life into this world. To feel this little person grow inside you and watch them be born and see them grow up was a miracle I wanted to experience again. I was already on board with having another one only few months after Girly Monkey was born (although I wanted to wait for a bit). So we decided to try another time and we got our Little Monkey as a gift. Little Monkey was a bit of a challenging baby and it took us couple of years before we decided that we were indeed going to try for one last child to add to our family. We were thrilled when we found out that we were pregnant again, and never regretted our decision.

Our family grows

When we were only 4

   Every single one of our kids were planned and wanted. Every single one of them are loved very much. But for some reason, people feel the need to let us know how crazy we were for getting pregnant again. They often make us feel like we owe some sort of debt to society for having more than 2 kids. I get that 2 kids is the standard for most Canadian families, and everything is made for a family of four (2 parents, 2 kids), but that doesn't mean that we're bad or wrong for having as many kids as we felt we wanted. We care for all our kids, we support them, we feed them, clothe them, educate them. Why is it that it's so offensive to some people to see responsible married couple raising their family with more than the standard amount of children. We're not even really that big of a family. There are many families that have as many as 10 to 19 kids, and I never look at them as weird. As long as they love all their kids, support them, parent them, then it should be none of my business how many of them they have. I would be more concerned over a single mom who has had 3 kids with 3 different fathers and really didn't want any of them. Or an alcoholic who has only one child, but that child is not loved or cared for. Numbers don't give you the whole picture of who the family really is.
   Life is difficult as it is, living in a four-person-family world when there are (or will be) 6 of us. Attraction packages deem "family package" as 2 adults and 2 kids, special offers, like kids eat free with paying adult, usually have a limit of one child to one adult, hotel-rooms are not made with big families in mind and usually don't have room big enough to fit a family of 6, houses are no longer build with big families in mind. These are some of the challenges that we are willing to face as we become a family of 6. Having people question our ability to choose how many kids we will have is not something that I am happy about. I do understand that maybe not everyone had a grand time being a parent, and therefore they see everyone who would willingly go into parenting multiple times as "insane", but good manners suggest that these people should keep that to themselves. My family always had a rule that if you had nothing nice to say then you should just say nothing at all. So what to do next time when you see a large family in your local grocery store? Don't make rude comments about the size of their family or status of their fertility but instead smile and say how their life as a family must be full of excitement and fun with so many people around.

Loving every minute of being a parent