Friday 10 January 2014

About siblings.


My beautiful sister (and her darling husband) moved to Melbourne yesterday and I'm feeling pretty sad about it. My little bro also moved to Melbourne a couple of months ago, so now I'm the lone NSW sibling, and missing my siblings has made me start thinking about my family and how many kids we want. 

Now that Olive's a toddler people have started asking if we're going to have another baby, and I've had lots of conversations with other mothers about how many kids they plan on having. One of the main things I hear people say when they're talking about planning their family is that they only want 1 or 2 kids because they want to be able to give them a lot of things that wouldn't be possible if they had a big family. Things like a big house, overseas holidays, toys, clothes, etc. are nice, but I know we had as much fun on our yearly family trip to the Gold Coast (3 kids crammed in the back of the car between body boards and cooler bags)as we would have had skiing in the Swiss Alps. Having my siblings move away has made me realise that, for me, the most important thing I think we can give Olive is a family. 

We very well might be done at 2 kids, but I want to make sure that we don't make the decision about how many kids we have based on something that doesn't really matter to us in the the long run, like having to buy a bigger car, or that we might end up doing more camping than staying in 5 star hotels. The best thing my parents ever gave me was siblings, not "stuff".  


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