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Having two kids close together (18 months apart) has created such a conundrum for me when considering whether or not to have more children.

Next month, my oldest turns 3 and my youngest turns 1.5. Now that my oldest is speaking in full sentences and my youngest is walking, both my husband and I have been feeling more tempted by the idea of having more children. We are on the same page that if we have more, we will likely be done at 3 kids and 4 kids would be our max.

The conundrum comes in with the fact that because our first two are so close in age, they have such a close bond and they will really be able to “grow up together” since they will be in such similar stages of life and development. This is something that I want for all of my children as, in contrast, I was 6 years apart from my middle sister and 12 years apart from my youngest sister and I know from experience that large age gaps can make it harder to forge strong sibling bonds. My husband, on the other hand, is 1.5 years older than his middle sister and 3 years older than his youngest sister and they all are really close. Yes, I know that some people are really close to siblings they have a big age gap with and some people aren’t close with siblings they are close in age with, but generally speaking I think it is more common and likely that you’re going to be close to someone who is only 2 years older/younger than you rather than someone who is 6 years older/younger than you.

Two pregnancies close together was challenging and with spending the last year and half in the trenches of having two very young children with no family around to help, I haven’t had the bandwidth to focus on restrengthening my body through consistent exercise. I also am committed to extended breastfeeding and plan to continue breastfeeding my youngest until she is 2-2.5 yrs. My body is not in the best position to get pregnant again so soon and I don’t want to have to stop breastfeeding my youngest due to my milk drying up because of pregnancy. Given those considerations, I likely wouldn’t be ready to get pregnant again for another year, meaning the age gap between my current youngest and a new baby, assuming I got pregnant a year from now, would be a little over 3 years.

Since my oldest two are so close in age, I would feel a bit guilty if we had a 3rd and they forever felt left out of the closeness that their older siblings share. As far as the sibling bond goes, my husband and I both like the idea of having another two about a year and a half apart so that we have two sets of kids close in age with a bigger age gap in the middle. HOWEVER, having already had 2 under 2, I know how demanding that is on me and I fear that it would be doing a disservice to my older two children to have another two kids close together. I worry that I may not be able to show up for them in the way they need if I am absorbed in having another toddler and baby. And because of my commitment to extended breastfeeding, I would do what I did with my older two and tandem nurse that I don’t have to wean the oldest of the two new babies too soon (in case the math isn’t clear, in order to have babies 18 months apart, you have to get pregnant with the second baby at 9 months postpartum, and there is no way that I want to wean before a year). Having been there and done that, I know how draining tandem nursing can be and, again, I worry about how I would handle it with two older kids to also take care of.

Given the many practical considerations, including things I haven’t even mentioned but also play apart in the decision making— finances, having to get a bigger car, room arrangements, etc., sometimes I think that we should just stop while we are ahead and stick with two kids. Then I start to think about how many times I’ve heard stories or seen videos of middle aged or elderly people talking about how they wish that they had more children while they had a chance. The time of our life when we can have children is finite and fleeting. My husband and I are already going to be 30 (me) and 35 (my husband) this summer. As much as I worry over the challenges of having more kids, I equally worry over living with the regret of not having more and letting my decision to only have two be dictated by fear.

Parenting is so wild because you can go from being 100% at your mental/emotional limit, feeling so frustrated, overstimulated and exhausted to feeling so full of love and joy as you watch your children make each other laugh or perform a skill they just learned to sobbing in bed looking at pictures of when they were babies, simultaneously thinking about how precious, sacred and heartbreakingly fleeting this time is and berating yourself for every time you feel like you failed to be the parent that you want to be, all within a 12-24 hour period. 🫠

I am genuinely so tired of the liberal framing of things that tries to divert from the topic at hand and act like one thing isn’t a problem by just bringing up another problem.

Just saw a post that said, “They blame immigrants so you won’t blame billionaires.”

How about, now hear me out, we address both problems???

Yeah, the fact that America is a basically a pseudocorporatocracy and that more and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of billionaires is a problem that should be addressed.

That doesn’t mean that mass immigration is not a significant problem, in fact, it is one of the defining issues of our time.

But, in the liberal structuralist world view, immigrant = oppressed, which means they can do no wrong and therefore immigration is never a problem and if you think it’s a problem then of course it’s only because you’re racist.

Your favorite romantic moment in a period drama is Mr. Darcy’s hand flex in Pride and Prejudice (2005), my favorite romantic moment in a period drama is when Uhtred breaks the shield wall at Ethandun after seeing Iseult’s severed head.

We are not the same.

#jokes #but seriously #I’ll take Uhtred over Mr. Darcy any day #rugged warriors over uptight gentlemen forever #The Last Kingdom

No matter how many times I watch Gilmore Girls, I will always be mad that Rory turned down Logan’s proposal, especially given her storyline in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. However, despite it being a really unsatisfying ending to the show, I suppose it is realistic. Not only did Rory internalize her mom’s commitment issues/fear of marriage, she was also part of the peak girl boss generation that was sold the idea that women should put their career above everything, that going to a top college was a guarantee of a great career and that it would be possible and preferable to find a great man and settle down in your 30’s after you’d spent your entire 20’s focusing on nothing but your career. She turned down stability and certainty to chase a fleeting sense of excitement. She turned down love because, like her mother, she was unwilling to make any sacrifices to accommodate a relationship, even with a great guy. She turned down job opportunities that could have been given to her by Logan’s dad’s connection out of a prideful sense of independence. And in the end, she didn’t get the great guy or the great career.

What makes it really sad is that there was a whole generation of real girls like Rory.

Genuinely I mean this in the nicest way possible but there is no form of cope that comes off more cringy than people trying to show why being child-free makes their life so (supposedly) awesome. I don’t deny that having kids comes with a lot of responsibility and can be unpleasant and stressful at times, but trying to sell that giving up leaving a flesh and blood legacy on this earth and experiencing the profound sense of meaning that comes from being a part of raising the next generation so that you can have more time to sleep in, do yoga and dote on your pets and houseplants is always going to fall flat.

If I had to succinctly summarize what the female hormonal cycle is like it would be this

Follicular/Ovulatory phase: Flirty and Thriving

Luteal/Menstrual phase: Dumpy and Grumpy

#if I could be the version of myself that I am when I’m ovulating all the time I would be a different woman

Instagram stories archive does a great job of keeping me humble by reminding me that when I was a hardcore leftist in my early 20’s I was, in my own current estimation, wrong about almost everything and absolutely insufferable about it. Truly there is no group of people with more undeserved confidence in and overly-emotional aggression about their worldview than 21 year old leftist college students, speaking from experience.

thesecularhousewife

I picked up a book about virtuous womanhood I found at one of my local thrift stores last weekend and I loved the intro so much, I had to share.

“What is womanhood? Is there any more important question for young women to consider than this? It should be the highest ambition of every young woman to strive toward possessing a heart of true womanhood. Earth presents no higher object of attainment. To be a woman, in the truest and highest sense of the word, is to be the best thing beneath the skies. To be a woman is something more than to live eighteen or twenty years; something more than to grow to the physical stature of women; something more than to wear flounces, exhibit dry-goods, sport jewelry, catch the gaze of lewd-eyed men; something more than to be a beauty, a wife, or a mother. Put all these qualifications together and they do but little toward making a true woman.

Beauty and style are not the surest passports to womanhood-some of the noblest examples of womanhood in the world, have looked quite plain in outward appearance. A woman's worth is to be estimated by the real goodness of her heart, the greatness of her soul, and the purity and sweetness of her character; and a woman with a kindly disposition and well-balanced temper, is both lovely and attractive, even if her face is plain and her figure imperfect; she makes the best of wives and the truest of mothers. She has a higher purpose in living than the beautiful, yet vain and supercilious woman, who has no higher ambition than to flaunt her finery on the street, or to gratify her inordinate vanity by extracting flattery and praise from society, whose compliments are as hollow as they are insincere.

No gift from heaven is so general and so widely abused by woman as the gift of beauty. In many cases, it makes her thoughtless, giddy, vain, proud, frivolous, selfish, low and mean. I think I have seen more girls spoiled by beauty than by any other one thing. "She is beautiful, and she knows it," is as much as to say she is spoiled. A beautiful girl is very likely to believe she was made to be looked at. And believing and acting thus, she soon becomes good for nothing else, and when she comes to be a middle-aged woman she is that weakest, most sickening of all human things—a faded beauty. Outward beauty is shallow-only skin-deep; fleeting only reigning for a season. But inward beauty will last forever.

If you desire to be admired and beloved, be an example of beautiful womanhood and cultivate the virtues of the heart. Wealth may surround you with its blandishments, and beauty, learning, or talents, may give you admirers, but love and kindness alone can captivate the heart. Whether you live in a cottage or a palace, these graces can surround you with perpetual sunshine, making you, and all those around you, happy.

Seek then, fair daughters, the possession of inward grace, whose essence shall fragrance and vitalize the affections, adorn the countenance, make sweet the voice, and impart a hallowed beauty throughout your very being.”

Daughters of Destiny by Noelle Wheeler

Published by Mantle Ministries Classics

thesecularhousewife

I just finished re-reading Gone With The Wind and it occurs to me that the dichotomy between Melanie and Scarlett is a perfect example of the sentiments expressed in this passage.

For anyone who hasn’t read the book, I would heartily recommend it.

Me: Oh my gosh, with an energetic 2 year old and a teething 8 month old it’s so hard to get things done around the house!

Also me: I should buy a mini loom and start learning to weave and, though I have no musical background, I should learn how to read music and start learning the piano so I can help my husband give our daughter piano lessons in a few years, oh and I need to restart my Latin Duolingo lessons so I can teach the kids basic Latin when they’re older since I want to homeschool using the classical model of education and…

People need to stop with the emotional manipulation when it comes to illegal immigration. I just saw a post going on about, “America feels like home because home isn’t where you’re born, it’s where you choose to be 🥺” and “I came to love America because my El Salvadoran neighbor could share tamales with my South Korean neighbor and somehow it felt like the most American thing in the world”.

You don’t get to just “choose” to live in America because it’s where you want to be. You have to follow our laws and respect our sovereignty by coming here legally. You need to apply to come and respect our decision to allow you into our home country or not. This concept applies to every sovereign country in the world.

As an American, I wouldn’t be within my rights to just say, “I’m going to go live in France, it’s my home now because it’s where I choose to be” and then be shocked and appalled if I were deported.

Access to America is not a human right. We are not the world’s soup kitchen. People from other countries bring many aspects of their cultures with them when they come here, not just their food, and many of those cultural proclivities are diametrically opposed to Western culture.

If it is understandable for foreigners to want to come to America to improve their quality of life, it should be understandable for us to want to stem the flow of illegal immigration and deport at least some of the literal millions of illegal immigrants who flooded this country just in the 4 years that Biden was president to improve our quality of life.

Common refrains like “ this country was built by immigrants” used as a means to manipulate people’s empathy and lack of historical understanding are hugely deceptive.

Firstly, this country was founded by pilgrims and pioneers. There is a vast difference between settlers who built a nation from the ground up and those who migrate to an already formed nation.

Secondly, the waves of immigrants who came to this country pre-WW2 came to a country without the vast network of social services that we have now. Immigrants had to hack it on their own or return to their native countries, and many did repatriate of their own volition. Many modern immigrants come to America, and other Western nations for that matter, and are able to remain here only because of the beneficence of our welfare systems. Then you also have communities of immigrants who scam our well-intentioned systems to drain even more of our resources, like the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, among others, committed by Somalis in Minnesota.

Thirdly, immigration to American was largely limited to European nations prior to the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965. Assimilation is never a painless process, but it is certainly easier when those coming into a given country are from a culture that is reasonably similar to that of the country they are immigrating to. Culture comes from people, not from land. Some cultures are hugely dissimilar from others and will inevitably clash in important ways, meaning it is very difficult for some groups of people to mix cohesively. Loss of social cohesion undermines feelings of trust, safety and community.

Somehow it’s easy for many to feel that it’s acceptable for people from other countries to break our laws in order to serve their own interests but it’s, in their minds, unacceptable for Americans to desire for our laws to be respected to serve our interests.

America is our home and it is entirely reasonable for us want to see our home preserved our us and our progeny, not given away to the entire world.

Yesterday I saw a post of a trans activist saying, “It’s funny how we [trans people] are apparently too strong for women’s sports but too weak for the military”, like it was some kind of brilliant gotcha moment.

My eyes immediately rolled back into my skull. It’s hard to believe that anyone could fall for such a deliberately obtuse excuse for an argument.

There are obvious physiological differences between men and women, strength being one of them but not the only one. This is evidenced not only in the many trans identifying males who have won in women’s sports competitions and broken women’s sports records, but also in the lack of trans identifying females winning men’s sports competitions or breaking men’s sports records.

The argument for keeping trans identifying people out of the military has very little to do with the physical strength, it has to do with, firstly, mental fitness, which is taken into consideration not only amongst trans identifying people but also people with other mental illnesses. The argument that trans identifying people aren’t mentally ill is patently absurd. Secondly, having any condition where you require constant access to medication makes you undeployable and “requiring” surgeries, which will be payed for on the tax payer dime no less, also makes you unfit for service.

The fact that the trans movement has gained as much mainstream acceptance as it has is a true indictment of the collective critical thinking skills of the American populace, the arguments in favor of it are all so easily debunked.

I picked up a book about virtuous womanhood I found at one of my local thrift stores last weekend and I loved the intro so much, I had to share.

“What is womanhood? Is there any more important question for young women to consider than this? It should be the highest ambition of every young woman to strive toward possessing a heart of true womanhood. Earth presents no higher object of attainment. To be a woman, in the truest and highest sense of the word, is to be the best thing beneath the skies. To be a woman is something more than to live eighteen or twenty years; something more than to grow to the physical stature of women; something more than to wear flounces, exhibit dry-goods, sport jewelry, catch the gaze of lewd-eyed men; something more than to be a beauty, a wife, or a mother. Put all these qualifications together and they do but little toward making a true woman.

Beauty and style are not the surest passports to womanhood-some of the noblest examples of womanhood in the world, have looked quite plain in outward appearance. A woman's worth is to be estimated by the real goodness of her heart, the greatness of her soul, and the purity and sweetness of her character; and a woman with a kindly disposition and well-balanced temper, is both lovely and attractive, even if her face is plain and her figure imperfect; she makes the best of wives and the truest of mothers. She has a higher purpose in living than the beautiful, yet vain and supercilious woman, who has no higher ambition than to flaunt her finery on the street, or to gratify her inordinate vanity by extracting flattery and praise from society, whose compliments are as hollow as they are insincere.

No gift from heaven is so general and so widely abused by woman as the gift of beauty. In many cases, it makes her thoughtless, giddy, vain, proud, frivolous, selfish, low and mean. I think I have seen more girls spoiled by beauty than by any other one thing. "She is beautiful, and she knows it," is as much as to say she is spoiled. A beautiful girl is very likely to believe she was made to be looked at. And believing and acting thus, she soon becomes good for nothing else, and when she comes to be a middle-aged woman she is that weakest, most sickening of all human things—a faded beauty. Outward beauty is shallow-only skin-deep; fleeting only reigning for a season. But inward beauty will last forever.

If you desire to be admired and beloved, be an example of beautiful womanhood and cultivate the virtues of the heart. Wealth may surround you with its blandishments, and beauty, learning, or talents, may give you admirers, but love and kindness alone can captivate the heart. Whether you live in a cottage or a palace, these graces can surround you with perpetual sunshine, making you, and all those around you, happy.

Seek then, fair daughters, the possession of inward grace, whose essence shall fragrance and vitalize the affections, adorn the countenance, make sweet the voice, and impart a hallowed beauty throughout your very being.”

Daughters of Destiny by Noelle Wheeler

Published by Mantle Ministries Classics

#traditional femininity #tradwife #traditionalism #virtuous womanhood

Being a mother is such an incredible, incomparable experience. To create and carry another person within your own body. To have that little person capture your heart so completely. To watch them learn and grow and feel more pride and joy than you’ve ever felt before. To have that same little person test your patience in ways you didn’t think possible. To have such a salient sense of purpose in life knowing that they need you. To become a better version of yourself because of and for them. What a gift.

Happy Mother’s Day to all my fellow mothers 🤍

#mothers day #motherhood matters

Something that I feel very strongly about now that I’m a mother is that pets are not equivalent to children in any manner. We have way too many people out here thinking that having a cat or dog is basically the same as them being a parent, and more than that we have waaayyyy too many people thinking that having a cat or dog is actually better than having children.

You can love your pets deeply, and that’s great. You can choose not to have kids and have a pet instead, that’s your choice.

But the notion that pets are equivalent or even preferable to human children is ridiculous.

I’m aware this an unpopular opinion but I stand firm on it 100%.

thesecularhousewife

Children’s literature is a passion of mine, especially now that I am a mother. Introducing children to not only good stories but lovely art in the form of illustrations is part of “providing a feast of knowledge” as Charlotte Mason referred to in her philosophy of education, especially in the early years before you delve more into academics. With that said, here is a collection of some of my favorite authors and illustrators.

Tasha Tudor

Elsa Beskow

Sibylle Von Olfers

Cicely Mary Barker

Beatrix Potter

Jill Barklem

Jan Brett

Phoebe Wahl

Daniela Drescher

thesecularhousewife

Special mention for Kinuko Craft who produced some of the most visually stunning illustrations I’ve ever seen.

windsdaughter

if you are a woman who wants to be a wife and a mother its actually important that the man you say yes to date, be in a relationship with, and marry actually has skills, resources, and drive. its important that he is honorable and his actions show it. its important he is *actually,* not just conceptually, capable of making a life for you both and any children. him just wanting to be with you, or worse - simply agreeing to be with you....is not enough. that is the ground level. please do better!

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