January 13, 2002
The Cost of Parenting
___ It may take a village to raise a child, but you can be sure it takes parents to pay for it all.
___I was reminded of this in a recent e-mail from a friend we knew from church in another time and place, someone we had lost track of until the wonder of the Internet caused an unplanned connection.
___He asked about our boys, how old they are now. Of his own family of three children, who we knew only as babies and preschoolers, he said only this: "Our oldest, Kathryn, is 13 now and needs braces."
___As a parent, I read that was not a statement about her physical development but as a statement about the cost of raising children.
___Alison loves to tell the story of our journey to the ultrasound lab about 11 years ago this month. She was 8 weeks pregnant, and because of her past history of problem pregnancies, the doctor wanted to get an inside view as soon as possible.
MARK WINGFIELD
___The technician quickly identified a teeny tiny heartbeat, paused, and then blurted out in a whispered exclamation: "Wait! There's something else in there!"
___Turns out it wasn't an alien invasion, just a set of normal developing heartbeats from twin boys.
___We were speechless at first, dumbfounded by God's goodness and by the shocking news.
___Alison's first thought was, "How am I going to survive this pregnancy?"
___Mine, on the other hand, was, "How am I going to put twins through college?"
___Little did I know that the cash register would start its double rings long before college.
___There's the cost of a "free" public education, $5 here, $10 there, $30 somewhere else. Then there's the cost of piano lessons, baseball, basketball, soccer, more soccer, Scouts, camps, clothes, food, band instruments--and the list goes on.
___A couple of years ago, I tried to add up all the costs of our extracurricular kid activities in a single year, and the total roughly equaled our grocery bill for the year.
___I was tempted to write our friend back and say simply: "I know. Luke and Garrett just made their first visit to the orthodontist. Can car insurance be far behind?"
___I can't even go there. Car insurance for two teenage boys at the same time? I see a great increase in freelance work in my future for sure.
___ Mark failed to mention a few other items, including birthday presents. And I don't mean just birthday presents for our boys. Our social animals get invited to birthday parties all the time.
___I have a stash of gifts in my closet for all their friends' birthdays, so when possible, we can raid the "gift closet" instead of making a mad dash to Target or, at this age, Best Buy. I try to buy things on clearance that I think boys their age would like. It's getting tougher all the time--10- and 11-year-old boys are not always an easy crowd to please. The best bet is a gift certificate to some place that sells CDs, DVDs and video games.Unfortunately, gift certificates never go on sale.
ALISON WINGFIELD
___ College is increasingly on my mind. One of the first words we tried to teach the boys was "scholarship."
___Just the other day, I was chatting with some moms about parents who choose to send their kids to private schools. We live in an excellent public school district, so it puzzled us to know why parents spend the money for private schools. I made the comment that I'd rather have the money to send them to a good college, and one of my friend's quickly quipped back, "I'd rather feed my family."
___ She has two boys also.
___That grocery bill Mark talked about is getting ready to increase. Two preteen boys in the house adds up to some serious eating. Even though mine are picky eaters, what they do eat is increasing in quantity. When they come home from school, they raid the pantry like they haven't eaten in two days. Kroger has become my second home, as well as Tom Thumb, Super Target and Sam's.
___If we had sat down and really worked out the cost of having children, we might have been scared away from having a family at all, simply because we couldn't imagine how we could afford it. But that would have been our loss. I can't imagine life without my two sweet, wonderful, exasperating twin boys.
___God in his wisdom never gives us the full picture at once. We have to take it one step at a time and trust in God's providence to take care of the rest.
___But I'm still wondering, How do you put twins through college?
PREVIOUS HE SAID/ SHE SAID COLUMNS:
2001: 1/1, 1/8, 1/22, 2/5, 2/12, 3/5, 4_19, 4/2, 4/23, 5/14 6/11, 6/25, 7/9, 7/23, 8/13, 9/3, 9/17, 10/9, 11/26, 12/3, 12/17
2002: 1/14, 2/4, 3/11, 4/8, 5/20, 6/24, 8/5, 9/9, 11/4, 12/16
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