It seems the older children in our family can’t help
occasionally feeling robbed. If only our parents, they’ve all
bemoaned, had had the good sense to stop
having children sooner, life would have been so different. And by different they mean awesome. Quiet car rides, no babysitting, vacation
homes in Hawaii and Vail—all of it could have been theirs, along with piles and
piles and piles of money, if only we’d stopped having kids.
Don’t misunderstand; they love their younger siblings. They’d just like the option of trading them
in for vacation points. As our family
has grown, they’ve concluded that kids cost money and require sacrifice, and
they’re right. It costs roughly 200,000.00
to raise a child in a middle-class family to age 18, if you don’t hit Baskin
Robbins after baseball games, and only watch movies on Netflix. Times that a few times over and you’ve got a
lovely cottage in Costa Rica. What have
we done!
When faced with this dreamy interpretation of life without
little siblings, we like to counter by telling them they’ve got it all wrong,
that we’re only motivated out of necessity.
If we’d had one or two kids, Dad and I would be taking pics at the DMV,
occasionally scoring a gig on the weekends doing weddings, but mostly just
putting in our time, heading home, and reconnecting with our avatars. We tell them, as we hand them the keys to the
beater car we’ve given them to drive, that we’re better off because we chose to
have a big family. And to this they blow
raspberries.
They’re convinced that skiing in Switzerland, elk hunting in
Montana, and cliff jumping in Mexico would all be checked off their bucket list
were it not for our abundance of fertility.
And maybe they’re right, but one thing is for sure—the younger ones
provide endless entertainment. They are:
dapper
rough and tumble
style conscious
nutritionally conscious
And our family wouldn't be complete without them.
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