As most people know, we’ve been contemplating the possibility of having a second child.  As we continue to think our way through all of this, we keep coming up with more things to consider.  Honestly, we both always knew we wanted 2 kids, but we put the thought of a second one completely out of our minds for years now.  So, things that we have forced ourselves not to think about are now rising to the surface.

Anyways, another decision we’ve made is that we cannot have a second child while both working basically full-time.

We currently have a nanny on a temporary basis.  Since our son was about 8 weeks old we’ve always had a nanny 3 days a week, and just recently we moved her up to 4 days per week.  This is working for us at the moment (but we do know we will lose our nanny soon enough and are trying to find a daycare/day home setting to transition to as we’ve completely given up on finding a new nanny).

And, we will not put an infant into a daycare/dayhome.  In Canada almost everyone gets 1 year maternity/paternity leave so it’s pretty atypical to have babies in childcare.  And honestly, it’s hard to even find  a provider that accepts them really young. So for us, we really want to keep our child(ren) at home for at least a year (with the help of a nanny). 

We really just want to raise our children.  We want to be the main part of their early years.  We want to watch them grow, kiss them better when they fall and be there for all the little things, not just the big things. We just want all the stuff that I suspect most parents want!

Yet, also like many parents there are some weeks where one (or both) of us are working more then full time hours.  As an example, last week just for one client I worked 62.5 hours plus went to other client meetings – so I actually worked about 72 hours.  Many of those 62.5 hours happened after Baby MPB was in bed and during weekend nap times. and Thankfully it was not a stressful project, it was just horribly time consuming.  Granted this was an extreme rare occurrence for me, but the point is this does happen.  If you were to visit our house, 4 days a week we have our nanny from 8-4, so our days looks a bit like this:

• 3am – wake up/feeding (ideally only one of us wakes up).
• 6:30/7:00am – 8:00am – wake up, breakfast, playtime.  (One of us is with Baby MPB and the other is either sleeping or working).
• 8:00am – 4:00pm – nanny is with Baby MPB, we both work but often visit and say hi throughout the day.
• 4:00pm-5:30pm – playtime/run errands with Baby MPB (on busy weeks one of us is usually working, but not always).
• 5:30pm-7:00pm – supper, bath, playtime, night bottle.
• 7:00pm – on busy weeks, we go back to work until whenever we are too tired to function.

Part of the reason we work during the evenings after Baby MPB goes to bed is to ensure we spend time with Baby MPB while he’s awake and to protect our weekend time – we both work very hard not to work on the weekend so we can have a few days of family time.

Anyways, I’m starting to get off topic.

Since we are both self-employed we have no back-up to help us and we also eat what we kill (to use an old consulting saying).  Basically, if we don’t work, we don’t get paid.  If we work, we get paid. And the other thing about consulting is the fear of what work we will have next month – we work from contract to contract and just hope we find enough work for the next month.  So, far, we are able to, in fact, work just keeps coming our way and this really hasn’t caused us too much stress.  But, as basically everyone in consulting knows, you never turn down work because they might not call again. And so, we work.  (There are many benefits to consulting and being self employed, but that’s also not the point of today’s post, again I digress).

And so, all of this is to say that in order to have another child, we both realize we cannot do it as we are today.  The thought of attempting to work to pay our bills, parent another infant and a toddler (Baby MPB) and enjoy life, seems slightly slightly impossible at the moment. We are managing today, but there have been some really hard times, especially when Baby MPB was little, and he is only one baby.  We figure a second child has to be twice as much work!  Oh, and let’s not forget that Baby MPB is a really good sleeper which we both think has made a huge difference to our ability to manage.

And so, in all honesty, we have no idea how to address that because right now we are still paying down our adoption debt and in all likelihood would incur more debt to pay for a gestational carrier. And having debt means we have to work to pay it off plus just the regular costs of living (mortgage, food, etc). 

But, we also know we don’t have to do this tomorrow.  In many respects we are still young (we are both 33) and time is sort of on our side.

(I feel like this post was a bit all over the place, clearly my mind is muddled).

If you like this post, please feel free to share and please click the follow button on the side or return to myperfectbreakdown.com to follow my journey.