my history of spawning: to spawn more? that is the question

i have four children. for as long as i can remember i have wanted six children. i don't know why. due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g., life) i now have four children that all over the place age wise.

i got pregnant my freshmen year in college. most anyone would have said i was not at the best age to have a child. i was not crazily messed up but i was immature and 'in search' of myself. i decided to have my daughter. sometimes i do see my decision as a decision of self preservation. i had my daughter at 19 and i had to be somewhat stable...well, as stable as one can be at 19. i only missed one semester of college and i got married to her father. i graduated from undergrad in 4 years and then decided to go to graduate school in philosophy.

when my daughter was getting ready to go to kindergarten i got baby fever again and decided 25 was old enough to have another kid. i was still in grad school and my husband was just doing odd jobs but i figured what the heck. i had my son in 1995 and we were shit ass broke. i think we were living on like $1000 or less a month. i went back to grad school and ta'ing.

by 1998 i realized that i just couldn't imagine going through life with my husband. for some reason up until my late 20's i still though life had do-over's. i started realizing it didn't and i made the decision to get a divorce.

i met my second husband in 1998. we were both in grad school together but he was applying to medical school. luckily he ended up getting into medical school at the school we were both attending and he didn't end up moving away. i got a real job and he started medical school. we wanted to make sure we could make it through medical school and we got married in between the spring and summer semester in May of 2000.

He has always been a good step-dad but was always leery of having kids of his own. With me working full time and him in medical school kids were out of the question anyway. I decided that whenn he started residency would be the best time for us to have a child. During his last year of medical school: I got my IUD pulled out in october, i was pregnant by december, i was doing and adjunct professor gig that ended in May, he graduated in May, he started his surgery residency June 1st, and I had our twin boys on July 24th. My daughter was 13 and my son was 8.

Residency has been very hard on our marriage. Money has been tight and my husband works A LOT. We also have twins. My husband knows he wants more kids and most of the time i want more but i am getting older. If we had more kids we would have to wait until he is done with residency--June 2008--we would actually have decent cash flow for once in my adult life and he would have to work less. BUT....i would be 38! My daughter is going away to college this fall so i would have a college sophomore. I don't know if i have it in me.

today i took the twins grocery shopping with me because we just got back from vacation and we had no groceries in the house. as we walked in carter asked for goldfish which made me think of my ex-niece who used to insist on tomato soup w/ goldfish crackers in it for lunch. this made me think she is now 20 and as the youngest of three children her mother is no free to do what she wants and doesn't have some toddler asking for goldfish and i thought that was so sad.

then i went grocery shopping and my children were f-ing monsters. finn was grabbing food off the shelves and tossing it. i ended up buying three things of snack pack fruit containers coz he tossed them to the ground and broke them. he then proceeeded to start pulling his brother's hair.

maybe it might be nice to not have someone asking you for goldfish.