An Interesting Conversation
SandiaPinaMama
member
...with my mother. I'd thought I'd share with you gals for two reasons.
Mom has 5 kids.
Kid #1 was 2 years 9 months when Kid #2 was born.
Kid # 2 was 18 months when Kid #3 was born.
Kid #3 was 2 years 4 months when Kid #4 was born.
Kid #4 was 8 years 1 day when Kid #5 was born.
I asked her about spacing. She said that she liked the 18 month spacing the best. She said those two were the closest growing up. Interestingly, we are all quite close now. She said that the two that are nearly 3 years apart were too far apart. She also said that about the 8 year gap, but you might have guessed that wasn't planned. Some of us have been thinking about spacing lately, so I thought I would share that.
Second thing to share: When my mom started puking when my sister was 8 months old, she called her OB and said she thought she was pg, but she never had a period. He said she was wrong. She kept puking. He finally said she should come in. These were the pre-pee stick days. I asked if he was able to do a urine test in the office, or if it was a blood test. She laughed at me and said it was a physical exam. Apparently, they looked at the cervix to see if it was blue. If the cervix was "baby blue," you were knocked up. No one ever commented to me during pregnancy that I was blue there, but of course, I've never seen my own cervix. Isn't that crazy. Seems like an OWT, but it really happened.
BFP#1 "Watermelon" born 3/2011
BFP#2 "Pumpkin" 7/14/12 ~ EDD 3/23/13 ~ Natural M/C 8/3/12 @ 7 weeks
BFP#3 "Pineapple" born 4/2013
BFP#4 "Grapefruit" EDD 3/29/16
Re: An Interesting Conversation
Obviously, your mom is real and Ron Carlson is a fiction writer, but there's a Ron Carlson short story called "The Ordinary Son" about the only "ordinary kid" in a family of geniuses. In the story, the main character talks about geniuses having their kids ten years apart so they can spend the time "developing" each one.
One of my best friends from college is from a family like that. Her dad was the head of the Biology department at a major research university, and her mom went to medical school but became a SAHM instead of practicing medicine. My friend Anne has a PhD in clinical psychology and runs her own sleep study clinic in Atlanta, and I just looked up her little sis (out of curiosity) and she's in an ivy league grad program for clinical psych.
I wonder if I can still have kids at 44? ;-) My mom had my youngest brother when she was 47, but I don't know if I want to push it that much.
Knowing your taste in lit, I bet you'd like the Carlson story if you want to look it up.
Mac and cheese lover!
interesting!
DH's family - all 3 kids are pretty much exactly 2 years apart and all 3 are professionals. i'm not sure if a 10 year age difference is totally necessary or if it's all coincidence but interesting none the less.
In my family, we're actually all 3-4 years apart (my mom had a miscarriage, so there's an 8 year gap between the youngest two). I think it worked reasonably well. (I should say my family's really dysfunctional, but I think in a good family, it would have worked well.) My sister and I had similar interests, but we were apart enough in age that we weren't overly competitive. She was published in Europe first, and she illustrated a whole book before my book came out, but I was really excited for her. (Both of those things happened while she was in college.) Actually, she lived with me when she was in college.
With my brother being 8 years younger than I am, I felt like I got to help him out a lot. I put him through college for his first year, and I actually drove him to college and got him everything he needed and moved him in to his dorm...
My youngest brother is 17 years younger, and that's just all tricky because my mom basically abandoned with him when he was 2 weeks old with almost no instructions on how to take care of a newborn. She just told me where the formula was and where the diapers were.
But I think in a non-abusive/mentally ill family, the age differences would have been good. As it was, I'm glad the age differences were the way they were, so I could help out my one sister and brother. It would have been really bad if I hadn't been an adult already when my mom went to jail, and my youngest brother was two, etc.
Mac and cheese lover!
My sister and I are almost exactly 2 years apart. Even though we were close in age, we were never close. Hated each other. Had NOTHING in common. Have come to love and appreciate each other as adults, though.
I'm sure we could all provide some kind of anecdotal evidence regarding spacing, but it really just depends on the individuals, you know?
Interesting conversation for sure, though!