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I'd love to hear so much more from your experience! I'm on the fence about this topic and hearing from someone who has had more than 2 might help generalise ho

I'd love to hear so much more from your experience! I'm on the fence about this topic and hearing from someone who has had more than 2 might help generalise how having a kid could be. For me, it feels like one of the few things I've experienced in life on which I won't have much control over after the first decision (of having a kid). Almost everything else is me deciding every day to do or not do something. This is different.

noworriesnate 2y ago
I have five. It is the most utterly fulfilling aspect of my life. I'm going to (mis)quote John Deloney about this issue: You know how when you're single and making money hand over fist and you have a lot of money (compared to you as a teen), and it's awesome? And then you first get married, together you're pretty poor but you're having tons of sex, and it's a different kind of awesome? And then you have children, and you're sleep deprived and sex is kind of weird and the baby is pooping on stuff, but you see your own child--and again, it's a different kind of awesome.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Not very useful but thanks for the attempt :)
  - noworriesnate 2y ago
    LOL sorry, wish you the best either way!
K0balt 2y ago
You’re right about flipping the switch and then living that decision for the next 20plus years. Once you make that choice, you’re in it for the long haul. I’m kind of an extreme example because I took the job to heart and designed a whole new life around providing the best developmental foundation for my children I could figure out how to. For us,that was choosing to pivot from our comfortable cntracting business into a life intentionally filled with challenges , situations, hardships, triumphs, and struggles that we would overcome as a family. It was way outside of my comfort zone, to be sure, but the point was to give them actual life experience and skills so that when they became adults they would be as prepared as possible to manage situations, overcome obstacles, and manage risk. It was often uncomfortable but rewarding beyond measure.
- xandrius 2y ago
  This sounds interesting, do you have more information on what you pivoted into? I'm interested in doing something like world schooling and this sounds it might be related.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family. From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) . They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times. This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat. Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes. They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do. They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.

noworriesnate 2y ago

I have five. It is the most utterly fulfilling aspect of my life. I'm going to (mis)quote John Deloney about this issue: You know how when you're single and making money hand over fist and you have a lot of money (compared to you as a teen), and it's awesome? And then you first get married, together you're pretty poor but you're having tons of sex, and it's a different kind of awesome? And then you have children, and you're sleep deprived and sex is kind of weird and the baby is pooping on stuff, but you see your own child--and again, it's a different kind of awesome.

xandrius 2y ago
Not very useful but thanks for the attempt :)
- noworriesnate 2y ago
  LOL sorry, wish you the best either way!

K0balt 2y ago

You’re right about flipping the switch and then living that decision for the next 20plus years. Once you make that choice, you’re in it for the long haul. I’m kind of an extreme example because I took the job to heart and designed a whole new life around providing the best developmental foundation for my children I could figure out how to. For us,that was choosing to pivot from our comfortable cntracting business into a life intentionally filled with challenges , situations, hardships, triumphs, and struggles that we would overcome as a family. It was way outside of my comfort zone, to be sure, but the point was to give them actual life experience and skills so that when they became adults they would be as prepared as possible to manage situations, overcome obstacles, and manage risk. It was often uncomfortable but rewarding beyond measure.

xandrius 2y ago
This sounds interesting, do you have more information on what you pivoted into? I'm interested in doing something like world schooling and this sounds it might be related.
- K0balt 2y ago
  We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family. From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) . They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times. This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat. Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes. They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do. They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.