[beardyw]

Ready? When is anyone ready? My wife (of 18 months) and I just decided to have a baby. It never occured to us we weren't ready. In the 9 months we decided we needed to live somewhere with another room for the baby and moved in with 3 months to go. We had next to nothing prepared, but do you know what, it didn't matter. Babies demands are, at first very simple, food and sleep. We just handled the rest as we went along. We had done having children by the time we were 30.

[Balgair]

To some degree, you can't be 'ready' to have kids. They are a nuke that explodes in your life. You're totally different after having a kid. You're always 'on stage', listening, watching, being there for your kid. You can't just check out and 'do it tomorrow' when it comes to the kid (laundry, sure though). And telling people that don't have kids what it is like just ends up as a list of complaints and misses all the intense joys, and you can tell that they just don't get it.

[beardyw]

You replace one kind of good with another. If you never do that you will never grow.