When I was growing up, I dreamed of having four kids that were close together in age, who played amazingly well together, and were best friends, and stayed up all night Christmas Eve playing board games waiting for Santa to come. Yep, I had pretty specific dreams as a kid (and I was quite the optimist). See, before I became a parent, I thought babies were free.
I was in for a rude awakening.
It was a brutal the day I realized I would likely have to go into debt to have my children.
With Baby Number One, my husband and I were still in college; only five months after being married, we were pregnant. We were literally penniless and so we depended on Medicaid. Hey, that’s what it’s for, right? Now that Baby Number One is no longer a baby, and we have been out of school for a few years and are more “on our feet” financially, we’ve decided it’s time to for Baby Number Two.
And then reality set in: after crunching the numbers, we realized that we would really be pushing our budget by getting pregnant. But, with our only child getting older every day, we still decided to go for it. We have to at least try and take on the challenges and the costs as they come. To some, that may seem like a totally reckless thing to do, and maybe it is, but it’s our decision.
After thinking and worrying and running over the numbers again and again, we decided that we still want another child. When it comes down to it, the thought of delaying until we have more money and making my son wait until he is older before he gets a sibling breaks my heart. We can suck it up and take on some credit card debt to buy a crib, a few onesies, and all the other gear our new bundle of joy will require. We have insurance now (thank goodness!) and we are more solid financially than we were with our beloved first son, so we’re going for it. We’re not pregnant yet, but we are trying and knowing that, and holding close the hopes of conceiving soon makes my heart happy. While we are trying, we are also trying to save—”preventative debt” I keep calling it. It helps make this decision a little bit easier knowing we are doing all we can now to prepare for the day when I pee on that stick and the result comes back positive.
