The Perfect Family

From the moment you get married the question everyone inevitably asks is how many kids we want to have. I have such a hard time with this question. Is it so bad that I can't commit to any one number?

Some days I think I would love to have a big family (to me that means 6-7 kids) where we can all just be close to one another and have fun spending time with only us. My kids aren't going to have a lot of cousins, or at least many around their ages, so its pretty much just us all the time anyway. I would love to have us all be best friends and play games together all the time.

Then I have rough days, and I think 3 would be good! I can't even envision having the third at this point, but I know I will eventually. But what if 3 is another boy? Could I settle with 3 boys? Also, being young, would I be done before I'm 30 with having kids? The greatest appeal to having 3 is retaining my sanity. I don't know how to have a quality, deep relationship with so many kids at once. Do moms of 6-7 or even more kids really know what is going on in their children's lives? Don't the kids just run around unsupervised most of the time?

It would seem the happy medium for me is about 4-5, but naturally I have a hard time nailing it down. I come from a family of 4 and it always seemed small considering our large age gaps. We spent so much time with just our family when we moved that it made me wish I had more siblings often. I used to dream of two more kids between me and my sister, 7 years younger. 5 is probably my best guess, but who knows. At this point I feel very blessed to have these two guys around, and I'm not really anxious to add many more right away. Hopefully someday I can figure out my "magic number", but in the mean time I think we'll just focus on a case-by-case basis.