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Thanks for sharing, that's interesting.
My father in law also had (19?) siblings, but had fewer children himself. Would you be giving birth to these children? I've given birth to two children, and it was fine, but I certainly wouldn't want to have 12, even if I were much younger! Maybe if we were a bit younger, four? Some friends are having a third in their mid thirties, and we're wondering if we should too, but not strongly enough to actually go in and remove the birth control. Low hanging fruit for slightly increasing birth rates might be for birth control implants to last two years instead of five. These friends are wondering if they should homeschool, or planning to do that. I was homeschooled, but do not want to, at least for elementary school. My older daughter is much more talkative than me, and I don't want to be either ignoring her or driving her to social events all the time.
It's interesting to hear you're still interested in a large family with a disabled sibling living at home. One motivator for my not wanting a third child is worry over having a baby with health problems as I get older, and not wanting to be in the position of either terminating a pregnancy, or raising a disabled child.
We aren't likely to move to be with extended family. Both sets of grandparents are quite old, and would be willing to help out a moderate amount, but are in places we don't want to live, or would have trouble living, and aren't willing to move. My brother isn't likely to have children, and one brother in law does, but in a place we don't want to move, and we don't get along all that well with his wife.
Neither of us has careers where we feel competent or any kind of career trajectory, and we're wondering what to do about that. I went back to work a month after both births, and it was very stressful for my husband to be at home with an infant for multiple years, so that's also something of a limiting factor. It was also quite stressful to be working full time and breastfeeding as well. We met living in a foreign country, and would like to take the children and live somewhere similar to where we met, but don't really know anything about how to do that as part of a family unit, most opportunities are for single people. The only people I've known who have managed, at least for a while, have been missionaries, or maybe in the State Department (but that didn't seem to be working out so well for their families). Part of our interest is missing life in actual, functional, historical villages, where women watch each other's kids, and they can play on the street with the neighbor kids.
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