If you’re me: Look online at every house within your price range. Write down all the possibilities and then pick your top five favorites. Which just happen to be the prettiest ones and the ones in the nicest neighborhoods with the biggest kitchens.
If you’re my husband: Look at the list of all possibilities that your wife made. Enter them into Excel with information about the square footage, price, distance from work, how nice the neighborhood is, and how old the house is. Then weight each item according to how important it is and have Excel sort the list according a bunch of rules that take a really long time to create.
Notice that most of the top choices just happen to match your wife’s favorites which she intuitively picked by the pretty pictures.
Telling people I’m pregnant with my fourth child has been an interesting experience.
There were some people who assumed I’d be done after two children. After all, I had one boy and one girl, so there was no reason to have any more, right?
But when I said we wanted a third, people weren’t too surprised. Apparently three children is still within the realm of a normal-sized family to them.
But lately I’ve had strangers ask me, “Is that your first or second?”
And when I answer fourth, I get disbelieving shock followed by, “Oh. Well, I guess if that’s how many you want…” or “Wow. I guess if you like big families…” both uttered in a doubtful tone that tells me what they’re really thinking is something more along the lines of, “Woman, what the heck are you thinking having that many kids?”
Is there really that big of a divide between having three and four kids? Does three seem normal but four seem like a big scary family to you?
