Why Getting A Beagle Is Enough For Now

It's really important to know exactly what you and your soon-to-be-spouse expect during the first few years of married life. Some couples want kids right away. Some don't want any children at all, and would rather grow old, like so...

My fiance and I are somewhere in the middle of that. We do want a family. We want to have children, pets, the whole deal. But what we really want, for now, is a beagle named Science.

That's it.

I know a lot of couples who are doing, or have done, the same thing, and they all have different reasons for choosing to wait. Chris and I want to wait for at least a couple of years before treading the strange path of parenthood, because right now, we're feeling both selfish and unselfish about a few things.

We feel selfish over each other. We want it to be just the two of us for at least a couple of years before a new person, i.e. our child, decides to barge in. We want the house and bed to ourselves. We want to buy things for ourselves without having to worry about how this amount of money should go to diapers or milk. We want to travel - a lot - and we want to do it on our own.

At the same time, whenever we put on our mom and dad caps, we start feeling unselfish. We know we're just not ready yet, financially, emotionally, even physically - 'healthy lifestyle' isn't exactly part of our recently updated dictionary, where 'wet fries' was recently added as the newest term. Having kids is serious business, and we both want to be ready for it, so that our children will have the best life possible. That is our goal, and that is something we both know we aren't quite equipped to fulfill just yet.

More than anything, we just want to continue getting to know each other in such a different way from how we got to know each other while dating. We never lived together, so it will be interesting seeing each other literally every single day for the first time in our relationship. We know some of our quirks, but not all of them, and we'll experience them for sure when we start living under one roof. And quite frankly, I prefer to know about these things in the middle of watching Firefly reruns, not while I'm breast feeding.

So that is why, for now, we visit animal shelters instead of going through baby magazines. We purchase Halloween costumes for dogs, and onesies for our friends' babies. Although one really can't tell for sure when you're meant to have a baby, what we are sure of now are our current priorities. When the baby comes, I'm sure the wait will be worth it, and everything will fall into place.