It can definitely be done.

I’m getting married in a few months and I have no doubt that kids are soon to follow, at which point my fiance will need to take some time off of work, if not quit altogether as you did. This post gave me quite a bit to think about in terms of our future.

If you raise your kids with the idea that we’re all individuals, and not to be sheep, they’ll struggle a lot less in the long run. OTOH, it’s very difficult for me to cut any “extra” out of my bdget, because there is very, very little extra.

Although I have to say, only once as a kid did I get the impression we were struggling. We were a bit short on foodstuffs, and I was actually allowed to have ice cream for breakfast, because it was literally the only thing available that day. Best bowl of ice cream I ever tasted, but later that day, my dad never did let on that he knew I had taken money out of my piggy bank and “found it in the chouch cushions so can we have some milk and cereal for tomorrow?”

It helped that my parents always had a logical reason for things. We didn’t have cable because TV rots your brain (and really, we watched so much TV anyway, I could see my mom’s point that we’d be couch potatoes if we got cable), we had a smaller house so that we could actually feel like we lived together as a family, my brother and I didn’t need cell phones in high school (or, at all that our parents paid for them) because if we weren’t at home we were at school or a friend’s house, always had a phone available, we couldn’t get cookies because “it’s not on our grocery list”… things like that.