My Week with Kids

Finally, my husband and I have returned (and recovered) from our week-long trip to see the family up at the lake house. Since I'm 27, most of my family's children are grown, but I do still have one uncle and aunt with three small kids. They have 6-year-old twins (who are autistic) and one 3-year-old daughter.

My uncle and aunt employ a full-time tutor for their autistic children, who also acts as sort of a nanny, so effectively there were 3 parents to 3 children. Even then, though, my uncle and aunt definitely did not have the same kind of vacation that my husband and I did. Every minute was taken up with family/kid activities. My husband and I read by the water, went running and waterskiing and tubing, went out for lunches together, played mini-golf, swam in the lake, and built fires outside every night which we sat around drinking beer.

I asked my uncle (a hard partier pre-kids) if he wanted to come sit outside by the fire and drink with us after the kids were in bed one night. He was flopped in a chair with the paper, and told me (politely, but point-blank) that there was no way he was giving up that tiny bit of personal time. I understood, of course, but it made me sad.

Let me say for the record that my uncle's children are adorable, especially his daughter. At 3, she is incredibly precocious, bright, friendly and cute. I think spending time with her might have tempted my husband a little bit toward thinking that he might want kids one day; he's always been more toward the "ambivalent" part of the spectrum. But I've spent too much time thinking about what it would really be like to have a kid to want that. I know that as adorable as my little cousin is to play with, I do not want to have full responsibility for her 24/7.

Kids are fun in small doses. But I have no desire for them to be the main theme of my life.