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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22612 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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There's a lot of serious consideration here, and serious replies; so I'll add something a little more flippant. For me and my wife, our 4th was the easiest marginal change in every way (except the bedroom splitting). YMMV of course.

Oh man the bedroom splitting. So much of our household bedroom furniture arrangement depends on the sex of this not even conceived yet child.

I (male) shared a bedroom with my sister (female) for a pretty long chunk of time. It's really not such a big deal.

Yeah, in fact I did the same till age 8 or 10 so it's jumping the gun. I'm too used to thinking in terms of "a boys room" and "a girls room".

Ugh but closets. Whatever. Need to just resign myself to furniture constellations being something I'll have to tweak and change and tweak and change.

I've got 4 kids (2f, 3m, 4m, 7m) and 2 kids bedrooms. Every week, there's a different combination of kids in the 2 bedrooms based on who's on the ins and outs with each other (and who wants to sleep/read vs play). This all mostly takes care of itself though at least with the kids being young.

The real difficulty is meal time. Each additional kid limits what can reasonably cooked for dinner so that everyone will eat. We've started doing 2 main courses of kids food (e.g. nuggets + pasta or pizza + fish sticks) where we know that each kid will like at least one of the 2 choices. Otherwise, 4 hasn't been any more work than 3.

FWIW my family started falling into the two meal habit for a bit. I still do it as a treat for expensive food - I'm not going to serve my kids prime ribeye till their palate can appreciate it.

But I nipped that shit in the bud fast. I had to grab the reins of cooking for a while to do it which was exhausting after a full work day etc. etc. but the multiplicative effort from it got to be ludicrous.

I've been lucky my kids are responsive to the "no candy after dinner if you don't eat what we brung ya", so while they're picky I just don't care. I'm making stuff I know they like if they'll just try it.

The way we handle mealtime is we make one supper. And then if you don't like it you can have cereal or a sandwich.

But I'm lucky to have kids with no significant/difficult to accomodate allergies. My friend has a separate set of food restrictions for each kid, it's impossible for her to make only one meal for the family, 2 meals is already an achievement.

The work I feel would linearly increase with each kid is laundry (an unending task with three, I don't know how we wouldn't fall behind with four) and the pickup/dropoff juggle dance (bad enough with the bare minimum of just school/daycare and gets ridiculous if you want to add extracurriculars). Food and supervising definitely doesn't take much additional effort once you're already making the initial investment.

4 is, IME, where transportation becomes a real problem. Just the sheer logistics of it! And ofc needing a vehicle big enough for everyone, including mammoth car seats.

Probably the age spread makes a significant difference. Having one or two kids old enough to sit in normal seats (or up front) helps. Still situations where a kid is crammed in-between two giant seats.

See, it’s three where you get the minivan, and 4 is no issue.

It might help that my kids are relatively close in age, but logistics ain’t an issue for us.

I take my son to his piano lesson and watch my toddler, or I take my son to his piano lesson and watch my toddler and a baby, is not significantly differently

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