The truth of being maried w/ kids exposed....

This is why I waited until I am too old to have kids to get married...

It used to infuriate my dad when I would not eat my green beans.

Pop: Why won't you eat them.??

Me: Because they are touching the mashed potatoes.... (just saying I didn't like them would bring the story, Why, when I was your age......)

Pop: When its all in your stomach everything will be touching.

Me: Yeah, but I won't have to look at it then...

Pop: EAT YOUR GREEN BEANS.!!!!

Pop, after mom gives him the stop yelling look: Ok, after you finish your green beans you can have some ice cream.

Me: I am not getting any ice cream now.

Pop: YOU WILL GET SOMETHING YOU DON'T WANT IF YOU KEEP UP WITH THAT SMART MOUTH.!!!

Sister: Look daddy, I'm eating my green beans...

Me: sticking my tongue out at my sister.

Pop: Stands up quickly and starts removing his belt...

Me: Grabs one green bean and act like I am going to eat it, but instead ''accidently'' drops it on the floor, where the dog quickly snaps it up.

Pop: Slides chair back, sits down and grabs the newspaper shaking it open and hiding behind it.

Mom: Picks up a few dishes and heads towards the sink.

Me: Sees an opportunity and grabs half the green beans and put them back in the dish, while dropping the other half on the floor so the dog will eat them
therefore the green bean dish will still look empty.

Sister: Daddy, Billy put his green beans back in the dish.

Mom: Putting 3 green beans on my plate and says, Just eat three green beans and you will be finished.

Me: Green beans make me sick. (fake tears) You want me to get sick and die..??

Pop, dropping his paper to table level and looking at me: You want to be able to sit down in the morning.??

Mom: Alright, just eat one and you can have double fudge covered sugar zombies for breakfast in the morning. (according to the box, it's what the
astronauts eat to power through their day of walking in space. after a few root canals as an adult, I am starting to think that was just artistic
licensing)

Me, sitting there sulking with a pouty face for another 30 minutes: Ok, I'll eat one....

Me: I eat one and run off to the bathroom making retching noises....

Me, some half a century later: I still don't eat green beans, so I win..!!!
 
Seen it, never had kids that I am aware of, I never allowed anyone to come before my riding motorcycles, found a lady 16 years ago that has had surgery, and puts up with me, so no kids, and Harleys still rule, and been riding over 35 years.
 
I found a woman that wanted to not be a mom. Worked out prefect as I had never really liked kids. Never saw myself as a dad.

It’s nice when the two of you are aligned on major decisions, and it would be hell on Earth if you weren't
 
My parents had annual dinner parties and we kids (8 of us) were assigned duties as greeters, coat check and bartender. I remember taking a coat from one of the guests and the guy saying how well behaved we were. My Dad replied that we were that way because he beat us daily. You couldn't get away with even saying that these days.
 
We have one and it's what we can balance, given our economics and health particulars. I fully admit I could not do more without impacting my work-life balance, based on the energy and monetary input I consider nominal in order to feel I'm doing right by him, subjective a metric as it may be. But we're fine all things considered, and I enjoy sharing my passion for flying with my little family. And even if he grows up not to care for it, that's ok too, my wife certainly does enjoy it and we will continue to share this life journey well after the child emancipates. No day is guaranteed so we make the best of it. I do look forward to interacting with him as a teenager and young adult. I think the toddler years have been more interesting to my wife in the aggregate.

As to the question of not having any? Sure, I would have been fine with that choice too. It doesn't mean I don't put forth my very best foot forward in raising him in the image of my values with sincerity and genuine effort. And certainly have the bills for it lol.

I don't consider the proposition of being agnostic to the notion of parenting being a defining quality, let alone THE defining quality to a person's self-worth, and exerting full commitment to raising a child in a non-half-@ssed manner, a mutually exclusive proposition in the least. But hoo boy that utterance has certainly been threatening to some in the pedia-centric camp. Which is ironic considering I thought the DINKS would have been the ones to cast that stone first. Nope, it's the blasted multi-kid SAHM types that have gone there, go figure.
 
When my wife & I married (38 years ago next month), we neither wanted kids. At the 6 year mark, we were starting to think maybe... and we found out we were expecting. We have 4 ranging in age from 31 to 19. I would never even consider trading. People say "If you haven't had any you don't understand." which bugged me, but now, having been in both places, they're right.

Not making a judgement on anybody's choices, but really, they are amazing things which give me joy and make me proud (while also sometimes making me shake my head).

John
 
Having kids and raising kids are two very, VERY different things. I've been blessed with a very full life, with many opportunities do some good here and there, but by far my greatest contribution to this world are the three sons I raised with my wife. Unraised or poorly raised kids in public and in classrooms are a nightmare. Too many folks having kids, and very few raising them these days.
 
That's about right. Traveling with kids is an acquired skill. A couple years ago we went to Gulf Shores for vacation (a great vacation spot with kids, by the way) and I posted a picture of the beach view from our room on Facebook with the caption "Vacation: When you yell at your kids, but with the sound of waves crashing on the shore in the background."

Having kids isn't for everyone. We went into it figuring we'd just stop trying to not have kids and if we did, great, if not, we were having fun anyway. Now we have 3 (planned 2 but BOGO with the twins). Love all three of them. They make me smile and drive me nuts. We're having fun with them and we'd also have fun without them if they weren't here, but we wouldn't go back and change things.

However having kids right after you get married? No, don't do that. Enjoy eachother for a few years first. And enjoy your 20s without kids.
 
flhrci said:
Too many kids will kill your flying though.
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Kids > Flying

Last Saturday we did chores, went out to lunch, bought groceries, and watched some movies together. I had an awesome day just getting to spend time with my wife/son. Sure I like flying, fishing, dirt biking, but that all plays second fiddle.
 
Well the flip side is my mentor, wasn't a biker, but had motorcycles, but was a automotive geek, Boss 429 Mustangs, 69 Torino Cobra Jet Drag packs, 427 SOHC cars, yeah he was a teacher at my highschool, and help me to a better path, but he lived his last few years totally alone in a nursing home, no kids or family. But he helped so many wayward kids. I only tried 1 time, and his dad will never forgive me, I got him away from streer gangs and into cars, but he worked on his without a safety stand, and jack collapsed and he died, his dad would rather had him alive stealing and in street gang than me to have helped.
 
Most parents are insanely stupid about human biology. A good example is the never-ending drive to get kids to eat vegetables. It is really reasonable that kids don't want to eat vegetables, they're calorie poor and kids need all the calories they can get. Sweeten them a bit and kids will eat them just fine. I doubt this has ever occurred to any parent in the history of time.

Actually, I think most parents are insanely ignorant about, well, parenting. Mine certainly were, and I was the fourth of four, so you'd think they'd have figured it out. Amazing we muddle through as a species.
 
jsstevens said:
When my wife & I married (38 years ago next month), we neither wanted kids. At the 6 year mark, we were starting to think maybe... and we found out we were expecting. We have 4 ranging in age from 31 to 19. I would never even consider trading. People say "If you haven't had any you don't understand." which bugged me, but now, having been in both places, they're right.

Not making a judgement on anybody's choices, but really, they are amazing things which give me joy and make me proud (while also sometimes making me shake my head).

John
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Agreed in full. I always wanted to have kids "someday", but was never particularly excited about the prospect of actually following through with it. Wife and I were together for 7-8 years before we had our first (just turned 3 this week), and our second is only about 4mos at this point. I wouldn't have been able to fathom the joy I get from seeing my kids when I get home or playing on the weekends. Something to do with unconditional love and all that. I do not attribute anything about raising my children with my "self-worth", nor do I believe that should be on the forefront of how one determines their self-worth. It doesn't take much to have a kid, but it does require a lot to raise a kid properly. I believe I have a lot of positive attributes and useful knowledge to pass on, and for me, having a child is the best way to do that.
 
MuseChaser said:
Unraised or poorly raised kids in public and in classrooms are a nightmare. Too many folks having kids, and very few raising them these days.
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BINGO. Can't rep this post enough. My personal favorite is the part-time divorced parents and their embedded mid-month vacations from the child(ren), casting aspersions on us fatigued full-timers without reprieve because we're a bit "tight" on the social life, to use a wide euphemism. Ditto for the slacker parents who downplay the energy and monetary expense of children, because they straight slack off for 18 years, then act shocked and chagrined when people tell them their kids grew up to be drains on society.



flhrci said:
Too many kids will kill your flying though.
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100%. I fully acknowledge having more than one child in my present circumstances would make it financially impossible to retain ownership of my airplane. I've never had compunction addressing that nuance. The most vociferous vitriol I've ever experienced on that topic has been from the multi-kid households, not the childless crowd. Which surprised me at first, until I began to understand the psychology of the pedia-centric. A lot of spite for single-child couples coming from that crowd. Again something I admit I would have thought would come from the DINKs first. Not to say DINKs can't and are in fact often quite misopedic, but they're equal opportunity haters when it comes to the question of n=1 child households. Aka they're intellectually honest and consistent, whereas the multi-child houses can be quite hypocritical on that front.


texasclouds said:
Kids > Flying

Sure I like flying, fishing, dirt biking, but that all plays second fiddle.
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That's a false dichotomy. Just because I decided not to follow some Bible-driven version of family planning (aka let the invisible man in the sky "tell me" when to stop impregnating my wife and racking up the dependents count) doesn't mean I'm gonna short the one kid I do have the funds for the proverbial cancer treatment because that would get in the way of my airplane upgrade. Good bad or indifferent, line items affect the ledger, and dependents are no different. If I have more, there's less left over to cover. For multi-child households to get sanctimonious and assert True Scotman fallacies on single-child or no-child households goes beyond the pale for me.
 
flhrci said:
Too many kids will kill your flying though.
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Just delay it. I was 52 by the time I got my ticket.
Ted DuPuis said:
However having kids right after you get married? No, don't do that. Enjoy eachother for a few years first. And enjoy your 20s without kids.
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I dunno. We popped out five by the time we turned 28. My wife says she spent the 1980s pregnant, nursing, and potty training (often two of those at once). Yes, it was tough. Yes, we all survived. Yes, we were dirt poor for a long time -- especially during the years I was in the Army. The good part is, the kids are all out of the house and require minimal support, and we're still young enough to enjoy it. A frienf of mine just had his third kid at 51 years old (Surprise!!). Poor bastard.
 
DaleB said:
I dunno. We popped out five by the time we turned 28. My wife says she spent the 1980s pregnant, nursing, and potty training (often two of those at once). Yes, it was tough. Yes, we all survived. Yes, we were dirt poor for a long time -- especially during the years I was in the Army. The good part is, the kids are all out of the house and require minimal support, and we're still young enough to enjoy it. A frienf of mine just had his third kid at 51 years old (Surprise!!). Poor bastard.
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Funny thing is it probably makes more sense to have your kids in your 20s if you're poor then. If you have a good job that lets you do more when you're younger. But there's a lot of fun and stupid stuff you can do without having much money, and by the time you're older you're too smart to do it.

I am very, very glad that I didn't have kids until approaching the end of my 20s.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
Funny thing is it probably makes more sense to have your kids in your 20s if you're poor then. If you have a good job that lets you do more when you're younger.
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If you have kids... you're poor anyway. We just got a head start.
Ted DuPuis said:
But there's a lot of fun and stupid stuff you can do without having much money, and by the time you're older you're too smart to do it.
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Yeah... like having kids. :) People (incredibly rude people) asked us why we had so many kids. Told them we didn't have a TV.
 
DaleB said:
Yeah... like having kids. :) People (incredibly rude people) asked us why we had so many kids. Told them we didn't have a TV.
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Different ways of doing it for sure, and no "one size fits all" just figuring out what makes the most sense for each person/couple's wants. I saw a lot of people of my mom's generation graduate college, get married, have kids. Now they're grandparents and wish they'd done some adventuring like my mom did after college. They didn't do it then and now that they're older, they don't feel up to it. My aunt and uncle did the same and now as they approach their deaths, I look at their lives and think I would be very unhappy to have lived the life they did. But that side of the family is very boring.

I think most people on here are exempt from that because as pilots, we're off adventuring more than the average person ever does, so my general advice might be less applicable.

Big things for me were that if I had kids in my 20s, no way would I have been able to learn how to fly and start Cloud Nine. Or even if one could've argued that I could've done it, I wouldn't have.
 
DaleB said:
Yeah... like having kids. :) People (incredibly rude people) asked us why we had so many kids. Told them we didn't have a TV.
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I usually make a joke like, " Geez, have y'all figured out what causes that yet?"

Am I being rude? I certainly don't mean to be.

A friend of mine is in his 60's, oldest kid is in her low 40's, youngest is probably 11 now. Total number of kids is six. The oldest three lived with him until they grew up and moved out.

The younger three, with his second wife, got taken from their mother for some reason after they got divorced. My friend is just an old hippie. Lives in a cabin in the woods on 300 acres he paid off long ago. He was also considered an unfit parent when CPS was looking for a home for the kids. The kids ended up getting adopted by a very wealthy family. If you saw these kids before that adoption, filthy at all times, never wore shoes, never got haircuts, spent more time in the woods than in a house. Now they have their iPhones and ride around in luxury SUV, it's a shock to those of us who watched them grow up.

IMO, he was never an unfit parent, he just didn't live like the authorities expect you to live when you have kids nowadays. His three oldest kids grew up the exact same way, in the exact same cabin, but it was a different time. They all turned out great.

Shows how much has changed in a couple of decades.
 
Fiveslide said:
I usually make a joke like, " Geez, have y'all figured out what causes that yet?"

Am I being rude? I certainly don't mean to be.
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For those of us that grew up in large households (I have 7 siblings), it gets old. Not rude. Just tiring. I got lots of comments from kids at school growing up.
 
Fiveslide said:
I usually make a joke like, " Geez, have y'all figured out what causes that yet?"

Am I being rude? I certainly don't mean to be.
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Pretty much, yes. And we've heard it a thousand times, so it's annoying. Occasionally when it's one of the little old ladies, I'll tell them, "Yes, we did, and we enjoyed it so much we kept doing it."

We also got a lot of "Are you Catholic? No? Oh, Mormon?" Seriously.
 
Fiveslide said:
I usually make a joke like, " Geez, have y'all figured out what causes that yet?"

Am I being rude? I certainly don't mean to be.
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It's sort of like when people make fun of my last name with intentional mispronunciations.

You may think you're being novel and original, but after living with my name for 35 years, I can assure you I've heard them all.

Same applies with kids. We also get it with the twins a lot. "Oh was that on purpose?" etc. etc.

Actually the most annoying was "Oh I had Irish twins [kids born within 1 year of eachother] so I know what twins are like." No you don't. Not even close.
 
2 daughters, adults now, and no regrets.

My neighbor is an MD in a pediatric ER. The things he sees every day would destroy me. Sometimes it’s willful cruelty, but other times it’s simply parental ignorance, “I didn’t know that bathwater was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns!”
 
Matthew said:
My neighbor is an MD in a pediatric ER. The things he sees every day would destroy me. Sometimes it’s willful cruelty, but other times it’s simply parental ignorance, “I didn’t know that bathwater was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns!”
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When our son was born he had to spend the first couple days in the NICU due to "an abundance of caution." Next to him was a baby born to a drug addict who had to be given methadone. At first they asked Laurie and me to leave the room when they were talking about the kid's care but once the nurses realized we weren't going to blab or cause problems they didn't ask us to leave, just spoke quietly. Still I picked up enough to figure out what was going on.

I still think about that kid. It was hard for both of us to see.
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
For those of us that grew up in large households (I have 7 siblings), it gets old. Not rude. Just tiring. I got lots of comments from kids at school growing up.
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Seven siblings? There were eight of you? Didn’t your parents know when to stop? Damn man, even mine had the sense to stop at seven.

Yeah. Being one of seven, I heard a bunch of jokes as a kid too. Didn’t bother me too much but I can see how it could.

Ted DuPuis said:
It's sort of like when people make fun of my last name with intentional mispronunciations.

You may think you're being novel and original, but after living with my name for 35 years, I can assure you I've heard them all.
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I’ve got a long somewhat unusual last name. I suffered through that as well. It bothered me more than the large family jokes as it has lasted through adulthood whereas siblings jokes ended a long time ago.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I’ve got a long somewhat unusual last name. I suffered through that as well. It bothered me more than the large family jokes as it has lasted through adulthood whereas siblings jokes ended a long time ago.
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When Laurie and I got married I told her she didn't have to take my last name, and warned her that she would be doomed to listen to mispronunciations the rest of her life if she did.

It was very funny a couple months into our marriage when she realized how right I was. "Wow, nobody can pronounce this name at all" she said, shocked. I laughed.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
When Laurie and I got married I told her she didn't have to take my last name, and warned her that she would be doomed to listen to mispronunciations the rest of her life if she did.

It was very funny a couple months into our marriage when she realized how right I was. "Wow, nobody can pronounce this name at all" she said, shocked. I laughed.
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My wife kept her very short three letter maiden name rather than taking my twelve letter last name, only to discover that many Americans struggle with how to pronounce her name as well.
 
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Ted DuPuis said:
When Laurie and I got married I told her she didn't have to take my last name, and warned her that she would be doomed to listen to mispronunciations the rest of her life if she did.

It was very funny a couple months into our marriage when she realized how right I was. "Wow, nobody can pronounce this name at all" she said, shocked. I laughed.
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Do you pronounce it the french way or some other way?
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
That’s what I figured and how I have always said it in my head. Nobody can spell my name (last or first) correctly so I have tried to at least learn enough of other cultures to pronounce names correctly. At least I try.
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Nice thing about going to Canada is that almost everyone can spell and pronounce my name.
 
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