When Seth and I are out with Bastian, I sometimes wonder how many people look at us and wonder if we’re teen parents. I wouldn’t entirely blame them. Seth and I are young, and we look our age. We are definitely a young family. I’ve had a lot of people ask me why we chose to start our family so young.
Seth and I got married pretty young. I was 20, and he was 18. This is about the time where everyone’s jaw drops. Yes, I married an 18 year old, and I haven’t regretted that for a second. I don’t feel like we’ve had any issues because we were young. I love that we get to experience so much of our lives together because we’re so young. But that’s a different story.
When we first got married, we decided we would wait about 3 years before getting pregnant. 3 years just sounded practical. Last March, almost a year after we got married, we decided to get pregnant. It wasn’t the three years that we had planned. I wrote an entire blog post about a month ago all about our struggles with miscarriages and infertility. We ended up getting pregnant in July of last year, so just after a year of being married.
Bastian was born on April 21, just about three weeks before our 2 year wedding anniversary. We know that we’re young, and I honestly prefer it this way. When we started talking about getting pregnant, it wasn’t a decision we took lightly. We talked about it a lot. Rationally, pros and cons, reasons we shouldn’t, etc. We wanted to make sure we were ready. We’re financially stable and had a good amount in savings. We had a strong relationship and loved each other. We’d been taking care of our dog for a year and had managed to keep alive(although I can’t say the same thing for any of the plants we owned). And we felt like it was time.
One of the reasons I’ve been told we shouldn’t have started our family so young is because we don’t have time to just be us, just to be married. And I see the merit in that. We are a young family. We were together for two and a half years by the time Bastian was born. We’d had a chance to travel and moved around a bit, and bought a house together. We felt like it was time to put down roots.
Having Bastian doesn’t mean our life is on hold. We’ll still travel. We still go on dates. We still get to experience our life, but we get to do everything with our kid, as an entire young family. We’ll have plenty of time after our kids move out to just be us again. Plenty of time. In fact, we’ll still have a lot of our life left to enjoy being together and doing the things we love after our kids move out, because we’re so young. These are years that we get with our baby that we wouldn’t get if we waited to start a family.
That doesn’t mean that waiting to start a family is a bad idea. I think that it’s such an individual thing. Only you know the right time to start your family. Even though we’re a young family, we feel like we know what we’re doing and I am so happy to be a mom.