I Can't Think of a Good Title...

Life has a natural progression, right? You're born, you grow up, you die. But more importantly, there is a lot of in between stuff that tends to have a natural progression. First you date, then you get engaged. You have a bank-breaking wedding and then you have children. Somewhere in there you may have a career or you may travel, but ultimately once you get married, people expect you to start popping out the kids soon after. As a glass half full, idealistic type of gal, I had a timeline for my life. I wanted to graduate college at 22, get a masters by 24, married at 25, first kid at 26, etc., etc. I have learned to throw timelines out the window. I have learned that my life has definitely not followed a straight line of any sort.

My timeline has gone something like this:

Engaged at 24, broken engagement at 24 (Thank G-d!), met man of my dreams at 25, bought house at 26, got engaged to man of my dreams at 26, graduated from college at 27, got married the next day, masters degree at 28 and then work on career for a couple of years. Does something seem to be missing here? Come on, you know what's missing...you ask about it all of the time?!

Kids!!!

When are we going to have them? Do we even want them? Are we able to have them? I can answer these three questions very simply: don't know, think so, don't know. Was that clear? I thought not.

When you're dating for a long time people ask when you're going to get engaged. When you're engaged the same people ask when you're going to get married. When you get married, everyone wants to know when you're having kids.

We've been very happily married for four years now. Our friends have kids, our cousins have kids, our sisters have kids, but we don't. And we're okay with this. We enjoy being married, we enjoy being together.

For your questioning pleasure, I now give you the top 10 reasons why we don't have kids yet (or what we tell people who ask):

10. We're still young, we have time.
9. We're selfish
8. We don't like kids ;-)
7. I'm trying to focus on my career
6. We're waiting until we have more money
5. We don't want to have kids in NYC
4. We're waiting for our parents to retire so they can be our free childcare
3. But we're still children
2. I gave one dog to my mom and 3 dogs to my in-laws, would you trust me with a kid?
1. We're unable to

I would say that most of these aren't true, in fact only 7, 5 and 1. Especially 1. We've been trying for 2 years, or maybe NOT not trying if that makes any sense. Either way, we don't have kids and we don't know when we'll have some. I will share one thing with those of you who read this: when you ask you break our hearts. Usually there are two reasons that people don't have kids: 1) They don't want to or 2) They can't. We definitely want kids....draw your own conclusions.

Sorry if this seems out of the blue, sarcastic and somewhat glib, it's just that it's been on my mind a great deal lately. We recently found out that a dear friend of ours is pregnant - 17 weeks with a little boy. I'm so excited for her and her husband. When we first found out, Sam's first question to me was: "Are you jealous?" And to be honest - I'm not. I'm enjoying being her friend through the experience. I love watching her belly grow and I can't wait to start crocheting baby blankets for her. Of course I want one of my own, we're just not in that place right now. I love hearing about pregnancies, I love being around babies. I don't get jealous of others having kids. Strange, huh? It's a strong possibility that we won't be able to have kids and I think that I'm okay with that too.

Sometimes it's just fun to stir up ideas and emotions. This is my version of stirring the pot. This is not to make people feel bad, it's not to encourage a pity party or anything like that - I just wanted to put this out there.

That is all.

Now talk among yourselves.