I found out today that my sister is pregnant, due December 4th. She will be 24 this year. She has been dating her boyfriend for almost a year. He is 5 years older than her and in the military, due to deploy in 2012.
About 2 months ago (as it turns out right before she got pregnant) she had a conversation with me and my mom about the possibility of them starting a family before he gets deployed so that he can "leave something behind if anything ever happened to him". It was a good conversation and she was receptive to all of our thoughts on the matter.
I told her that in my ideal little world, they would get married before the first deployment, but wait until after the first deployment to have a child so that she could experience one deployment without also having to care for a child. I knew with that conversation that this was never going to happen but had to say it to her.
I then told her that for the sake of commitment, money, and health insurance, if she decided to have a child before he is deployed, that they should at least get married. They do intend to get married, I'd imagine it will be sometime this summer or in the Fall.
Apparently that conversation must have been meant to just warn myself and my mother that this was coming because she is now 7.5 weeks pregnant, and that conversation was about 7 weeks ago.
I understand that there is nothing to be done about it now so we really just have to be supportive, and we are (I already gave her my copy of Baby Bargains and my prenatal yoga dvd) but there's this aching part of me that feels she's going to regret moving this quickly some day and not taking her time to enjoy these parts of her life, it's not like there's any real need to rush. Also, she is very immature for her age, so to me this comes off as one of those pipe-dream 16 & pregnant thought processes.
Would you feel slightly disappointed by her decisions? I can't help it, even though I'm excited that Cam will have a cousin his own age.
Thank you for reading this far, I just needed to get this off my chest.
Re: please tell me what you would think of this
I think you can be disappointed in that situation. But, I would not talk of it for the sake of your family, especially not with your parents. She's likely to pull away, and she'll need the support. You'll also want your children to have a good relationship as cousins.
Definitely encourage her to get married. Get the ball rolling sooner than later so that she can develop a support network.