Alternative Lifestyles
D1 has spent an unusual amount of time either playing by herself or being held by someone else the past several days. Also I am planning on starting working from home for DOB tomorrow. These factors have caused me to realize that if I worked a normal job, I would be putting D1 in daycare about now, and thus caused us to ponder how our lives would be different:

We'd have a much bigger house, because my income would qualify us for a bigger loan and we'd need it because that's the kind of house financial professionals and lawyers live in.

And nicer cars. And we would just go out and buy an infant car seat instead of making the all-four-years one from the hospital work until one of the people who've promised to give us their old one finally remembers to do it.

In another month, when D1 started putting things in her mouth, she'd get sick all the time because she'd be putting toys in her mouth that twenty other kids had put in their mouths. So she'd be on antibiotics all winter, and I'd be stressed out because I'd have to keep taking time off work to take her to the doctor or stay home with her if the daycare wouldn't let her come.

With all that going on, we'd never get enough sleep. We'd drink a lot of coke and coffee to stay awake at work. We'd be grouchy.

I would be too tired to cook. We'd rely on frozen dinners and take out. Our food budget would probably be double or triple what it is now. And with the processed foods and D1's constant sickness, we'd be catching things all the time, too.

When we both got home, we'd be too tired to talk or read together. We'd watch TV for a little while and then go to bed.

Then again, we probably would have realized this would be a problem, and what with all our house and car and credit card (gotta furnish the big house) debts to pay off, we would put off having kids for another five years or so. No D1, D2 or D3. And by the time we did decide to have kids, I'd be older, we'd still have eaten a poor diet because I'd still be too tired to cook, and several years on the Pill might have messed up my hormones, so we might need fertility drugs. Maybe we'd get triplets to make up for lost time. :-P Even one kid would seem like a huge interruption, though, after we'd forced ourselves to get comfortable with life without them. My career would be that much farther along, and I'd probably want to get back to it ASAP. I'd take a few years off to get the (two) kids off to a good school, and then return to my more important work. We'd never have the time to know them--or each other.