Let’s Talk “Readiness”
My grandfather was an engineer with the Forest Service and the father of six children. The type of person who spent his retirement years growing vegetable gardens and doing mathematical analysis at the kitchen table for fun. He had started (as many of our grandfathers did) at war in the service and met and married my grandmother shortly after. With the GI Bill under his arm (and a job driving a car hauler up and down the west coast), he set out to finish school, become an engineer, and eventually land a government gig.Tomato Garden Their first kid, my mom, was born in between haul jobs and brought to their first home: a 16ft Airstream trailer.
The point I am making is that he was not a person given to radical whims. He was methodical. And when you would ask him how he knew they were ready to start a family with almost no money and a commuting job in between semesters of college, his answer was, "If we waited until we were 100% ready, none of you would be alive today. There's always unfinished business somewhere; all you can do is your best because no matter what you think it will be like, you can never prepare for every eventuality. We wanted a large family. It was important to us. That doesn't happen overnight. So we did what we needed to do to make that happen."