Kids. My husband, Owen, and I have two kids (that’s two children not two young goats/aka kids). Rose is nearly 16 and Ryan turned 13 just today. I now have two teenagers in the house! I know I am biased, but I think both of my kids are pretty cool. I genuinely like them 🙂 They are interesting and fun to be around. They make me laugh and smile and, sometimes, cry.  They’ve taught me to love K-Pop music and to like reptiles. I’m always learning something new when Rose and Ryan are around – and I’m really glad I’m their Mom!

All this said, there was a time after I married Owen that I didn’t think we would have kids. I’ll get to that in a moment…

Looking back, I always wanted to have kids. For some reason, I thought I would have three. That number may have stuck in my mind as ideal because that’s the number of kids in my family.  My family loves kids – I have such fond memories of my Dad holding little babies at church and how even crying babies quickly were content in his arms. Growing up, we had kids over at our house all the time. My little brother is 13 years younger than I am and I took care of him a lot. I was comfortable with children and couldn’t imagine a life without some of my own.

Part of my dream of having kids involved raising them on a farm and having lots and lots of other kids come over to hang out and play basketball. I’m not sure why I imagined the kids playing basketball – probably because that’s something I enjoyed doing as a teenager. My dream was always just a husband and a farm away…Then I started flying and considered flying for a career. The idea of having kids still stayed with me and I figured I could still get the farm and husband and all that. But no one seemed to want to marry me. Until Owen.

When I met Owen my life on the farm dreams were crowded out with life in the air dreams. Owen, even though he loved horses, would get an allergic reaction when he walked into a horse barn. My dreams of living on a farm didn’t seem to mesh well with a future with Owen. But that seemed okay because we both enjoyed flying and traveling and I figured I could still live on a farm somehow.

But there was that dream of having kids. Owen, quite simply, didn’t seem to like kids. Owen’s family didn’t seem to like children, either. I figured this was part of why Owen didn’t seem to like kids – maybe he just hasn’t have enough exposure to children, I thought. When Owen and I talked about whether we should have children or not, Owen would say he would be happy either way. Hmmm. I didn’t feel great about having kids with a man who was so-so about the idea. So Owen and I flew airplanes and I finished school and I got kind of used to not having children around. They would muddle up my plans to travel and fly, I convinced myself. Children would tie me down, I started to believe.

But I still loved children and felt something was missing in my life. Well, long story short, after many, many, conversations about do we or don’t we have children, Owen and I actually did decide to try to have a child. And, after seven years of marriage, Rose was born.

When Rosie was born it was like Owen forgot all of his not-so-thrilled-about-children past and he became a wonderful father. Owen has been a super Dad to Rose and, when Ryan arrived three years later, to Ryan, too.

It’s some sort of miracle, I think, that a non-kid-loving man now seeks out little babies and tries to get them to smile, just like my Dad used to do. It’s some sort of miracle, I think, that a non-kid-loving man turned into a great father.

Having kids has not, as I feared, muddled up my plans to travel and fly. Sure, I may have modified some of my plans along the way. I don’t dream of being an airshow pilot anymore, for instance, and I haven’t had enough money to travel overseas with the family –  but I have flown my little plane all over the country with Rose and Ryan in the backseat and seen things we never dreamed of. Sure, I don’t live on a farm – but I do live on an airport and live in the country. And I do have a basketball hoop and, yes, lots of kids do come over to hang out and shoot hoops. Life with kids is good! Life with kids is better than I could have imagined.