Babies BABIES BABIES!!

[birdgirl73]

Sweet Tal, you're so young that by the time you finish school and have your kids, you'll still be young. Seriously, if you have them in your early or mid 20s, that's young. When you look around at your baby's contemporaries' parents, I'll bet lots of them will be in their 30s and 40s.

I had our son too soon at 24. But I had that baby-fever feeling . . . I still get it now at 45, hearing in the background some very loud Westminster chimes tolling the approaching end of my ovulating years. I'm pretty sure most women who like children and have a functioning uterus feel that feeling. Having babies is part of what we're designed to do!

[Samwhore]

hm, ive said that I dont want kids either, but then I look at them and I say the same thing. I can imagine myself later in life with 3 boys (wierd, i know) but I cant see myself having a happy family. I can see myself in the typical dysfunctional family with my kids always saying "mom I hate you" and all that other stuff, I just dont know why. I guess I dont have that maternal instinct, and im kinda afraid to have kids, not because of the pain, but I cant see my kids happy.

[TheSmokingMonkey]

Ewwwww babies.

[Coelho]

hm, ive said that I dont want kids either, but then I look at them and I say the same thing. I can imagine myself later in life with 3 boys (wierd, i know) but I cant see myself having a happy family. I can see myself in the typical dysfunctional family with my kids always saying "mom I hate you" and all that other stuff, I just dont know why. I guess I dont have that maternal instinct, and im kinda afraid to have kids, not because of the pain, but I cant see my kids happy.

well... it will depends on you... maybe you had not a happy family, but it was not your fault... anyway, if some day you have a family and children, it will be your oportunity to give them everything you had not... so, love them, show them how great is your love, and they will love you back.

[Mrs. Greenjeans]

Ewwwww babies.

Babies rock. They start sucking when they start talking.

My oldest girl (now 8) talked so much, so nonstop, when she was 3 that I wasn't sure I was going to allow her to make it to 4.

[birdgirl73]

Babies DO rock. It was the 3-ish toddler phase when I began to first question the wisdom of future birthdays. Something about waking up in the morning, greeting a smiling 3-year-old, and then not being able to stop moving in his wake, hoping to prevent spills, crashes, falls, climbing disasters, breaking glass, liquids pulled off counters, etc., until he fell unconscious again, which never happened nearly soon enough.

[Mrs. Greenjeans]

...until he fell unconscious again, which never happened nearly soon enough.

::blackgirl voice::Mmmhmmm.
I know I'm not the only parent who used to wish for their kids to get a cold so I could legally give them Benadryl and knock their little rowdy asses out.

[dutch.lover]

Im young and im kinda getting the baby fever too...it's not that strong, but lately I have just been seeing soooooo many pregnant women, and they look so amazing, and the babies are soooo cute!! I was never obsessed about babies before, and I'm not really now, but it's definitely more than before. I think being pregnant would be awesome....but alas, I shall wait. I would like to have my first baby before I am 30. My mom had me when she was 27, and she is a good age for a parent IMO. I don't want to be too young, or too old....my friends uncle just had a baby with his wife and he is 51! That's way too old IMO, not to mention the risks to both the child and mother at that age (his wife is 46).

[Storm Crow]

Just a suggestion for all of your girls who are getting "baby fever"-- why not work for a while as a volunteer worker at a pre-school? It will help those of you who are having mixed feelings to get it all sorted out. Babies are delightful and demanding. They are screaming with stuff coming out of every orifice and getting it all over you. The next minute, they give you a smile straight from heaven. Taking care of other people's children is a great reality check!

And I was 27 when I had my first- the second followed about 4 years later. I stopped at two kids...I remembered all the stuff my brother and I pulled, and I wasn't about to be outnumbered! Two kids, two adults! Worked out pretty good, we're all still friends. My "baby" is 28. Granny:hippy:

[birdgirl73]

I just learned this week that I'm going to be an aunt! My younger sister (by a little less than a year and a half) is very newly, successfully pregnant after in-vitro fertilization. She's an older mom, 44, but she didn't marry until just a couple of years ago. So they're getting a bit of a late start, but we're all thrilled that there's going to be a baby in the family again. It could even be twins because they implanted two embryos, but it's too early to tell.

This takes care of the last remaining vestiges of my own baby fever. I have on some level held out hope for all these many years that I would get pregnant and have a second baby, but that isn't going to happen and my body and heart couldn't support a pregnancy anyway. Now I can be an aunt, and then by the time my sister's baby gets grown, I hope I'll be heading in the direction of being a grandparent.

This has been especially good news for my family because we lost my older sister to cancer exactly four months ago. Welcoming a new baby into the family later this year will be a lovely renewal of the circle of life.