When should you have a baby?

When is the perfect time to have a baby?

Never is the short answer.

There are pros and cons to having a family at every stage of your life.

Yes if you are older then you will have more money but that will probably mean that you have worked your way up and are enjoying a good carer. Are you going to want to give that up? Or are you going to carry on with your carer dedicating the same hours that you are currently? Does that mean that you will have less time to spend with your children? Will you have the energy to run around with your children and cope with the sleep deprivation?

Do you have them younger when our body finds it easier to cope with the additional stresses of being pregnant? Yes you can cope with the lack of sleep better and have more energy but can you financially provide for your child? Are you emotionally mature enough? Have you got enough life experience/ patience to cope with a young child?

If you are waiting for the perfect time you will never find it.

We decided that for us, the point when we chose to start a family was as good as it was going to get. Not everything was perfect but it seemed like as good a time as any.

The downside with the time we picked was definitely that we would be completing building work.

In our defence when we took on our house we didn’t fully appreciate just how many years it would take to fully renovate and finish. It’s currently ten and counting! That’s for another post.

We started the renovations five years before my first child was born. When we bought our house we knew that it needed a lot of love to bring it back to its former glory. The house dictated to us which order we tackled the jobs in by which part fell down next. We hadn’t been living in the house for long when the first ceiling decided to fall down. It had done it’s time, it had hung around for one hundred years.

Before I got pregnant we had already replaced all of the upstairs walls, ceilings, lots of the floorboards and had a new roof. In theory the majority of the work had been completed. We always knew that we would get an extension built and that we would have builders in to do that so all we had left was one room.

However, like the best laid plans the house would continue to throw up lots of surprises along the way.

While pregnant with my first child I ended up with no floors downstairs at all. I had to walk along a plank from my front door to my stairs every night when I got home from work. I then basically camped upstairs for months.

Shortly after my son was born my downstairs had new floors – we are talking floor boards here – structural not carpets!

In the lead up to getting an extension we had to continue to do maintenance and lots of patch up jobs to keep the house limping along until we had the extension done. This meant that from a very young age my son was fully aware of a vast range of tools and how they were used and what they did.

I always worried about how potentially dangerous this could be. I mean when you are imagining a baby proofed house you don’t imagine massive masonry drills and circular saws piled in the corner of your dining room. Obviously my children were never left unattended with these things. They spent most of their time in my front room that was fully baby proofed, finished and had a gate. When in all of the other rooms they were supervised and due to their state we didn’t spend time in these rooms, merely went into them to get whatever it was that was being stored in there.

Like all things in life it turned out that there was a positive to this situation. Both of my children are able to observe an area and identify potential hazards and stay away from them.

Recently when we were at the park there was a large hole in the ground, which had been fenced off with barriers ready for work to be carried out at a later date. My children automatically stayed away whereas my friend’s child went up to the hole and started to use the barrier as a climbing frame. Even though the child was told several times to stay away they didn’t. My children thought this was an alien concept but that’s because they have been bought up to know that there are always potential hazards around them that they must be aware of whereas my friend’s baby has been bought up to know that everything around them is safe and can be touched.

Every situation in life provides a learning opportunity. If I was choosing would I pick to have my children grow up on a building site? Of course not but they have learnt valuable lessons that they wouldn’t have if they had grown up in a prefect finished house.

I’m glad we decided to have children when we did. It wasn’t the perfect timing but I have come to realise that there is no such thing.