Newlywed Question

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CatholicGirl15

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My husband and I have been married for two months and we would love to have children as soon as God would allow. I am just looking for any advice parents/older married couples on here might have for starting a family! Thanks!
 
Catholic Girl, you can post wherever you desire. I am single, so I don’t know how much weight my opinion holds, but I am one of nine children. That should say something on what I think of marriage and children.
 
I’ve got a pretty witty reply in my head. But I don’t want to cause trouble here. I just want to be welcoming instead. I like new people. So my reply will just stay locked away. For now. 😉

So I tell you what CatholicGirl. The best advice I can give you is to listen to each other. To communicate feelings. To not take each other for granted. To find a good balance for all your interests. And to not forget about each other once the kids come.

The rest is easy. Just make kids. You shouldn’t have too much trouble figuring out how.

I don’t know if that was the sort of advice you were after. 🤷

Peace CG.

-Trident
 
CatholicGirl15 said:
My husband and I have been married for two months and we would love to have children as soon as God would allow. I am just looking for any advice parents/older married couples on here might have for starting a family! Thanks!
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Everyone is different,all married couples are different,
I always wanted a relationship that was like that of my own parents,
But nothing came close,simply because everyone’s expectations is different ,
What I would suggest to any young couple is this,
Get to know one another,become a two person team,have a savings plan,
Don’t have seperate banking accounts,have only joint accounts,
Create a long term plan to buy and own your own home on your own land,
When you have children,
don’t have more than 3 years apart,otherwise to big a generation gap,
I have lots of advise if you have the Questions
 
Thank you all 🙂 I am new to this and didn’t see there was a Family Life forum…I posted this under Liturgy & Sacraments since I figured marriage is a sacrament. Thanks!
 
Boring but important advice: plan your finances. If you don’t already have a budget, make one. Learn about baby essentials and what they cost, get a sense for schooling options and associated costs, etc. If you have debt, pay off what you can. Get a solid emergency fund, especially if you are going to stay home with baby.

Also a good idea to make sure you and spouse are in good health, scope out local doctors. Get plugged in to your community and parish.

None of these HAVE to be done before you conceive, but they are worth thinking about and putting effort into so you can start off on the best possible foot.

God bless you!
 
pensmama87 said:
Boring but important advice: plan your finances. If you don’t already have a budget, make one. Learn about baby essentials and what they cost, get a sense for schooling options and associated costs, etc. If you have debt, pay off what you can. Get a solid emergency fund, especially if you are going to stay home with baby.

Also a good idea to make sure you and spouse are in good health, scope out local doctors. Get plugged in to your community and parish.

None of these HAVE to be done before you conceive, but they are worth thinking about and putting effort into so you can start off on the best possible foot.

God bless you!
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Right.

Whatever you’re going to need to live on then, start living on as soon as you can. Don’t wait to cut back.

Don’t make a lot of permanent decisions right now (for instance, a home purchase). Figure it out as you go along. Don’t go all in on any decision. Don’t assume that things will go exactly as expected (for instance, breastfeeding or job security). Allow some wiggle room for changing course.

Here’s a short piece explaining some of the issues involved in SAHMing successfully:

thepracticalconservative.wordpress.com/the-practical-conservative-guide-to-proper-care-and-feeding-of-a-sahm/

You won’t agree with every single one of those points, but it’s worth thinking about the issues the author raises.

Good luck!
 
pensmama87 said:
Boring but important advice: plan your finances. If you don’t already have a budget, make one. Learn about baby essentials and what they cost, get a sense for schooling options and associated costs, etc. If you have debt, pay off what you can. Get a solid emergency fund, especially if you are going to stay home with baby.

Also a good idea to make sure you and spouse are in good health, scope out local doctors. Get plugged in to your community and parish.

None of these HAVE to be done before you conceive, but they are worth thinking about and putting effort into so you can start off on the best possible foot.

God bless you!
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THIS!

x1000!

Finances are probably the biggest thing you need to be on the same page for.
Second biggest is the nuts and bolts to raising children.

Speaking from experience…you don’t need to have everything ironed out with your first baby…but anything past that starts getting tricky.

Be flexible and roll with the punches.

I had plans with my first baby.
Exclusive breastfeeding and using that method to space my children.
None of that worked out.

If you have a baby and you want to space? DO NOT, I repeat…do not rely on breast feeding to make that happen.
Learn NFP and rely on that first.
 
Realize that a lot of things might not go the way you expected or wanted them to. There are a lot of unknown variables in pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and raising kids in general.

Plan financially. Figure out how much it will cost to add a child to health insurance, figure out how much formula will cost should you need or want it, add up the cost of diapers per month, decide whether you’ll want to move to a larger apartment or home and figure out how much that will be, add in costs for increased utilities, plan for whatever furniture items you’ll want, and then add in some more in case you need to unexpectedly buy things like a humidifier or prescription cream.

If you’re the kind of person (like me) who has to plan everything and be organized all the time, try to prepare yourself for the reality that a lot of the time you are going to just be in survival mode and have to let some things go. Those first few months after the baby is born, when someone gets sick, if you go back to work, if your husband is traveling for work, when the baby is teething, whatever…there will be a lot of times when laundry piles up and you have cereal for dinner, and the floors don’t get cleaned, and so on. You focus on keeping yourselves alive until you have a little more energy or time.
 
When after having kids do not forget to take care of each other. Sometimes the kids will get all the attentions and the spouse is forgotten about for a while. This will put a strain on a new marriage.😉
 
pensmama87 said:
Boring but important advice: plan your finances. If you don’t already have a budget, make one. Learn about baby essentials and what they cost, get a sense for schooling options and associated costs, etc. If you have debt, pay off what you can. Get a solid emergency fund, especially if you are going to stay home with baby.

Also a good idea to make sure you and spouse are in good health, scope out local doctors. Get plugged in to your community and parish.

None of these HAVE to be done before you conceive, but they are worth thinking about and putting effort into so you can start off on the best possible foot.

God bless you!
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Really good advice, but not a reason to delay, just to be a bit organised.
 
dreamer29 said:
When after having kids do not forget to take care of each other. Sometimes the kids will get all the attentions and the spouse is forgotten about for a while. This will put a strain on a new marriage.😉
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Absolutely - so true and so important.
 
Make your husband happy. Respect him, admire him, pay attention to him and his needs.

Cuddle, kiss, take little naps together and be there and ready for him. When he’s not expecting it, give him a nice, long hug!
 
Take time for the two of you now. It will be increasingly hard to come by as kids come along.

I hope this isn’t the case for you, and that you have lots of babysitters in the area. We…don’t. I honestly can’t remember the last time DH and I went on a date, but I think it was meeting up for half an hour at Panera while someone watched DD, and that was 4+ months ago. Before that…we saw Guardians of the Galaxy in theaters.

I would just about kill for an evening out with my husband right now, where I could dress up, look pretty, eat dinner that I didn’t cook or clean up after, and see a movie. I’m hoping we might get someone in to babysit for an evening next month. Maybe.

Basically, kids are AWESOME, but don’t forget to appreciate what you have now, either. It really is incredible to go on a date night, especially if you don’t have to get up with kiddoes first thing the next morning!

(We do at-home date nights, and I strongly recommend them, too, but they’re not the same as getting out of the house.)
 
CatholicGirl15 said:
My husband and I have been married for two months and we would love to have children as soon as God would allow. I am just looking for any advice parents/older married couples on here might have for starting a family! Thanks!
Click to expand...
I notice your question is a month old so this may not be relevant anymore. When we got married we decided to try and get the hang of NFP and recognising my body cycles first up while we were settling into married life and organising buying a house etc. That was about 9 cycles. I look back on that as having been a great benefit because I spent most of the next 6 years pregnant or breastfeeding which didn’t give me much way of observing the workings of my cycle.

By reading so many stories of anxiety and confusion after coming to CAF, I see the real value in getting the hang of it first up since there is generally around 15 years of avoiding preganancy if you have started having children quite early and decided to complete your family around age 35 or 40. You want to feel confident to some degree even while being open to Gods surprises. The big temptation when people realise they have made the decision to delay further children permanently, is to get a vasectomy or tubal ligation.
 
I think it may be best to try to get to know each other first. My parents’ generation was the generation that had kids right away. I am the first born and was born three weeks before their first wedding anniversary.

My parents fought for YEARS. It was horrible. There were times that I wished that my parents would get divorced. Now that they have an empty nest and have had one for many years now, they get along better than ever.

With having kids immediately (if that is what you want), you won’t have time to get to know each other while trying to take care of a family. Your attention will be on your child(ren).
 
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