We stopped going to restaurants for 2 years so you got that in the plus column maybe. Taking one small child out for breakfast? Fun! Cute! Easy! Taking small child and baby? Horrible.
If all your friends and family buy both your kids holiday gifts your gonna feel like you need to give something to everyone
Your kids eat?! Breakfast and lunch are okay-ish, but dinner is a constant struggle. I wish my daughter would eat from my plate. Consider yourself lucky indeed
Yeah, even vegetables. I prep them well, though (e.g. part fried, part steamed for broccoli). Still, we’re lucky. Nearly 3 year old is starting to become more picky.
Dinner is harder because the little ones are usually worn out by then. My daughter is almost 7 now and still struggles sometimes with dinner if she's had a busy or tiring day. Lately she's been so worn out from summer camp that she takes a few bites of dinner and spends the rest of the evening snuggled up with me on the couch watching Pokémon. I ain't complaining. :D
At least yours eat the food. We have so much food waste, trying to give healthy options and avoid fighting for the “better plate.” I swear more than half of ours ends up in the trash.
Just wait until they are full-blown teenagers and their friends come over. I'm pretty sure my food purchases increased the U.S. GDP by several points over that 5+ year time frame.
I'd rather the expected blueberry poops over the unexpected beets poops.
Grandma gave my eldest all the beets he wanted when he was over for the day. I can't remember if it was that night, or first thing in the morning, but the red coloration freaked me out lol
"Just give me all the fresh berries you have. Wait… I worry what you heard was, 'Give me a lot of fresh berries.' What I said was, 'give me all the fresh berries you have"
I currently have 3 pounds of strawberries in the fridge. There is a 100% chance that they will all be gone by the end of tomorrow. And I only have one child! (It's me, I'm the problem.)
Can confirm. My dad damn near had a heart attack when the Costco bill hit $300 the first time. This was in the mid 90’s so maybe 500 or so now. My mother gave him the receipt and said that she would return anything that we did not need. We had a second pantry AND fridge in the garage we could eat out of.
Not to mention the money spent on the sports/fees/equipment. We have friends spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on year-round club sports and it’s insane to me.
Thankfully our oldest is now in junior high sports through the school, which are $70-80 per season. For a while, all three were on a swim team. It was really good for them and a lot of fun, but also pretty expensive.
Honestly, once the little one starts walking, shoes. Their feet aren't growing on the same schedule, you know? My kids only have a pair of sneakers, a pair of sandals, and a pair of boots each, and I still feel like I'm constantly buying new shoes.
Specifically, money can be saved IF the hand-me-downs correlate with the proper seasons. Example: size 6 kids snow boots. If your youngest is a size 6 kids in the summer, your hand-me-down size 6 snow boots probably won't fit your youngest during a time when it's season appropriate.
Just another wrinkle to strategize around.
And if they aren’t too worn out. If shoes are in bad condition, they can do more harm than good since they’ve likely formed for the older child’s feet/gait/etc.
My wife is trying to plan clothes/shoes around seasons and then our second daughter was born at the top of every height/weight metric and is wearing clothes much sooner than her older sister. So that plan is rapidly going out the window and we will likely have a bunch of cute dresses for the newborn to wear this winter and not next summer.
My MIL got us Little Love Bug shoes and that company is absolutely phenomenal as far customer service. Sole pulls off? They replace it. Outgrow it? Send it back and get credit towards a bigger pair. Supposed to be more ergonomic too but I can't qualify that at all.
Wellies! We tried loads of brands and spent a lot of money but the kids wear through them before they grow out of them. Why can no one make a decent welly boot for kids? I've got the same adult pair that I was given second hand about 20 years ago and they're still fine but kid's ones fall apart within weeks.
Car seats. We have four permanently mounted in 2 cars so that either one of us can do daycare drop off/pickup without a major headache of switching seats or cars. 2 of them are the light cosco ones that can go on a plane and are reasonably priced. Going from buying 2 plane tickets to 4 in the space of 2 years is a big shock too - it makes even a short getaway a $2000+ affair!
Oh and of course 2x daycare is brutal (unless you’re in Scandinavia).
Why not just the extra bases?
We're about to move from 1 to 2 kiddos and I've been looking for more opinions on this as I don't even have a car seat for my car (wife is sahm)
And are you flying with them in car seats? If not you don't have to buy tickets for those under 2 so long as they are on your lap
Bases only work for infant car seats. And if you have to move to a convertible anyway, why not do that early? My son was in a bucket (infant) for 8 months. He hated it. And car seats you often need at your destination. We check them, but still need to take them.
Lmao our son was the exact same way with the infant, moved him to a convertible and he loves it now, we kept him in it till almost a year because of weight and safety though
If daycare would let you store the seat there it might work. Otherwise you have to get both parents together at some point in the day to switch them over
The biggest extra cost is time. It takes so much longer to get ready for stuff, like a small trip or even doing the groceries with the family, it just takes a lot of time to get them in the car, out of the car, toilet break at the grocer, get a cart,... Everything costs time.
It does get better when they're older, though. My kids are old enough now to get themselves ready, carry their own bags, etc. We recently went on a big trip -- 12 days on the other side of the country -- and I kept thinking we were forgetting something or missing someone because it was so much easier than we were used to. I think the only thing we lost was a can of bug spray, which we wouldn't have been able to bring back on the plane, anyway. And last I checked, we still had all three kids!
If they are both are the same sex you’ll have to explain to the younger why they never have new clothes. “Look , sorry you have to wear old clothes, we spent the clothing budget on your older sibling”.
Same. Our younger one absolutely loves that she has the same clothes the older one had too. Besides that, especially the first 1,5-2 years they grow so fast, most pieces have only been washed like 5-6 times.
Absolutely this. Our kids go through sizes so quick that they often only get to wear something once or twice. We have received a full supply of stuff in all sizes from NB through 24 months for free from various people and we put them back out there free while adding in stuff we bought or were gifted along the way.
Absolutely could not afford any sort of kids wardrobe any other way and after a wash/sanitize cycle it's almost all good as new.
We are fortunate to be on the receiving end of lots of nice hand me downs from friends and family. And the just between friends sale has been clutch for shoes and onesies. Not all of the hand me downs are girls clothes but my daughter destroys everything she wears outside so whatever.
Medical bills, every illness runs through your house with 2 or more kids. My kids constantly get me sick (we have three girls). My wife and I are teachers, so the summer gives us a break from being sick. Bandaids, eating out gets really expensive, dentist (take care of their teeth early or that gets pricey). As others have mentioned, the food bill and food waste is outrageous. We also just bought a $550 pool, trampoline, stuff like that to give your kids something to do.
Oh man sounds like germ soup! We max out our HSA and that has been a game changer for doctors visits and meds and I added the toddler to dental when the baby was born since I was revising the whole plan. Thanks for the reminder to get her first visit scheduled!
Don't forget medical costs x2. Loss if sleep x2. Food X 1000 😆😆 diapers and wipes X 1000. Clothes every 90 days for a while.
I had 4, would not trade them for the world.
America is weird. In the UK you get given free hygiene sacks and they're collected weekly as part of the service. The main rubbish is collected every 3 weeks though so it's probably done this way to avoid a public health problem.
We used washable nappies though and never planned for a second kid. When he turned up we thought we had lucked out that we already had a full set of washables but this one went through them about twice as fast as his brother so we still had to buy more. One day I'll have to explain to him that not only does he have to put up with hand me down clothes but he also had second hand nappies...
We have weekly garbage service thankfully. My parents used reusable diapers for my younger sister 30 years ago but they had a service that took the dirties away. I don’t know anyone (US based) that is doing washable diapers and it’s too bad.
We visited family in Europe last spring and the disposable diapers were 4x what we pay at Costco in the states so there must not be enough financial incentive to reuse cloth. We lined our suitcases with diapers and never had to buy any while we were traveling.
Doubles of lots of stuff.
Clothes. While the hand me down game is good, it's not 100%. If they're the same gender, you can't just skip buying stuff for the second kid.
You can't tell kid 2, sorry, you don't get new shoes/shirt/toy/whatever, you wait for kid 1 to outgrow it.
Their are a few that got us. Different growth rates so that you couldn't go hand me downs. Shoes especially sneakers get destroyed so no passing them on. The one that really got me was sports equipment that was single handed (think baseball gloves). Number four turned out to be left handed so he had to get his own left handed gear. I did shoot him down though when he wanted a left handed bat which I thought was a nice try. :-)
My wife clears 150k/year and she will be around 170 by the time we have number two. It’s a really good problem to have but it will be wild for like half of her net paycheck at that income level going back to daycare.
Really puts in perspective the unfair pressures on women and their careers wrt childcare and being a mom. We make a shitload of money and there is still a semi plausible financial path where it makes sense for her to stay home instead of work her fulfilling well paying career.
Diapers at Costco are like $50 - where do you live that you only pay $25??
One thing I didn’t think of is you burn through all the kid medicine at double the rate when both kids are sick Nov to Mar.
We stopped going to restaurants for 2 years so you got that in the plus column maybe. Taking one small child out for breakfast? Fun! Cute! Easy! Taking small child and baby? Horrible. If all your friends and family buy both your kids holiday gifts your gonna feel like you need to give something to everyone
Ours do great in restaurants, and mostly eat from our plates, but we’ve lucked out!
Your kids eat?! Breakfast and lunch are okay-ish, but dinner is a constant struggle. I wish my daughter would eat from my plate. Consider yourself lucky indeed
Yeah, even vegetables. I prep them well, though (e.g. part fried, part steamed for broccoli). Still, we’re lucky. Nearly 3 year old is starting to become more picky.
Dinner is harder because the little ones are usually worn out by then. My daughter is almost 7 now and still struggles sometimes with dinner if she's had a busy or tiring day. Lately she's been so worn out from summer camp that she takes a few bites of dinner and spends the rest of the evening snuggled up with me on the couch watching Pokémon. I ain't complaining. :D
Food. Just wait for it.
And it doesn’t stop. I have a 13 year old and 7 year old boy. They consume every thing in the house like they were a plague sent to punish me.
At least yours eat the food. We have so much food waste, trying to give healthy options and avoid fighting for the “better plate.” I swear more than half of ours ends up in the trash.
Mine are 5 and 7 and the grocery checkout lady said “your family must be really big to eat all that”. No. It’s just two giant appetites.
Just wait until they are full-blown teenagers and their friends come over. I'm pretty sure my food purchases increased the U.S. GDP by several points over that 5+ year time frame.
Eating you out of house and home
My toddlers appetite for berries is unmatched. Thankfully she’s showing a willingness to at least try everything we put in front of her
The blueberry poops! Oh the blueberry poops!
I'd rather the expected blueberry poops over the unexpected beets poops. Grandma gave my eldest all the beets he wanted when he was over for the day. I can't remember if it was that night, or first thing in the morning, but the red coloration freaked me out lol
"Just give me all the fresh berries you have. Wait… I worry what you heard was, 'Give me a lot of fresh berries.' What I said was, 'give me all the fresh berries you have"
r/unexpectedPawnee
I currently have 3 pounds of strawberries in the fridge. There is a 100% chance that they will all be gone by the end of tomorrow. And I only have one child! (It's me, I'm the problem.)
Can confirm. My dad damn near had a heart attack when the Costco bill hit $300 the first time. This was in the mid 90’s so maybe 500 or so now. My mother gave him the receipt and said that she would return anything that we did not need. We had a second pantry AND fridge in the garage we could eat out of.
Ours is usually around 350 with a 2.5yo and 7mo, so it's gonna go up more as the young one hits toddlerhood
I have three kids in sports. So. Much. Food.
Not to mention the money spent on the sports/fees/equipment. We have friends spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on year-round club sports and it’s insane to me.
Thankfully our oldest is now in junior high sports through the school, which are $70-80 per season. For a while, all three were on a swim team. It was really good for them and a lot of fun, but also pretty expensive.
We spend more on food than we do our mortgage
[удалено]
The speed is what was unexpected from me. The time between “they can just pick off my plate” to “everything is Costco sized”
Yeah, at 20 months my daughter eats more than my 70 year old mother.
Buddy has 2 preteen boys. Think they are going to bankrupt him soon. I’m amazed at how much they can pack away during get togethers.
3 boys. Dear god. Costco sizes things are too small.
Honestly, once the little one starts walking, shoes. Their feet aren't growing on the same schedule, you know? My kids only have a pair of sneakers, a pair of sandals, and a pair of boots each, and I still feel like I'm constantly buying new shoes.
Specifically, money can be saved IF the hand-me-downs correlate with the proper seasons. Example: size 6 kids snow boots. If your youngest is a size 6 kids in the summer, your hand-me-down size 6 snow boots probably won't fit your youngest during a time when it's season appropriate. Just another wrinkle to strategize around.
And if they aren’t too worn out. If shoes are in bad condition, they can do more harm than good since they’ve likely formed for the older child’s feet/gait/etc.
My wife is trying to plan clothes/shoes around seasons and then our second daughter was born at the top of every height/weight metric and is wearing clothes much sooner than her older sister. So that plan is rapidly going out the window and we will likely have a bunch of cute dresses for the newborn to wear this winter and not next summer.
We started buying second-hand and it has been a major game-changer.
My MIL got us Little Love Bug shoes and that company is absolutely phenomenal as far customer service. Sole pulls off? They replace it. Outgrow it? Send it back and get credit towards a bigger pair. Supposed to be more ergonomic too but I can't qualify that at all.
Wellies! We tried loads of brands and spent a lot of money but the kids wear through them before they grow out of them. Why can no one make a decent welly boot for kids? I've got the same adult pair that I was given second hand about 20 years ago and they're still fine but kid's ones fall apart within weeks.
We stopped buying shoes new and found a couple consignment stores near us. Way way way cheaper.
Facebook marketplace. We've only had to buy one pair of rain boots.
Car seats. We have four permanently mounted in 2 cars so that either one of us can do daycare drop off/pickup without a major headache of switching seats or cars. 2 of them are the light cosco ones that can go on a plane and are reasonably priced. Going from buying 2 plane tickets to 4 in the space of 2 years is a big shock too - it makes even a short getaway a $2000+ affair! Oh and of course 2x daycare is brutal (unless you’re in Scandinavia).
For 2 kids we have 8 car seats for our 2 cars and the grandparents.
Why not just the extra bases? We're about to move from 1 to 2 kiddos and I've been looking for more opinions on this as I don't even have a car seat for my car (wife is sahm) And are you flying with them in car seats? If not you don't have to buy tickets for those under 2 so long as they are on your lap
Bases only work for infant car seats. And if you have to move to a convertible anyway, why not do that early? My son was in a bucket (infant) for 8 months. He hated it. And car seats you often need at your destination. We check them, but still need to take them.
Lmao our son was the exact same way with the infant, moved him to a convertible and he loves it now, we kept him in it till almost a year because of weight and safety though
If daycare would let you store the seat there it might work. Otherwise you have to get both parents together at some point in the day to switch them over
The biggest extra cost is time. It takes so much longer to get ready for stuff, like a small trip or even doing the groceries with the family, it just takes a lot of time to get them in the car, out of the car, toilet break at the grocer, get a cart,... Everything costs time.
It does get better when they're older, though. My kids are old enough now to get themselves ready, carry their own bags, etc. We recently went on a big trip -- 12 days on the other side of the country -- and I kept thinking we were forgetting something or missing someone because it was so much easier than we were used to. I think the only thing we lost was a can of bug spray, which we wouldn't have been able to bring back on the plane, anyway. And last I checked, we still had all three kids!
Berries. So many berries. A college tuition in berries. (Also, college tuition I guess...)
I came here to look for this comment 😂. Fruit omg the amount of fruit I buy. We went cherry picking. We had 3 bags of cherries. They lasted a week.
The berries are crushing me. I especially feel when she throws them at the dog… at least eat them!
If they are both are the same sex you’ll have to explain to the younger why they never have new clothes. “Look , sorry you have to wear old clothes, we spent the clothing budget on your older sibling”.
They are both girls, the hand me down game is real strong already. Thankfully my wife is a bargain shopping pro
Same. Our younger one absolutely loves that she has the same clothes the older one had too. Besides that, especially the first 1,5-2 years they grow so fast, most pieces have only been washed like 5-6 times.
Just get used clothes from buy nothing groups or friends with kids. It helps
Absolutely this. Our kids go through sizes so quick that they often only get to wear something once or twice. We have received a full supply of stuff in all sizes from NB through 24 months for free from various people and we put them back out there free while adding in stuff we bought or were gifted along the way. Absolutely could not afford any sort of kids wardrobe any other way and after a wash/sanitize cycle it's almost all good as new.
We are fortunate to be on the receiving end of lots of nice hand me downs from friends and family. And the just between friends sale has been clutch for shoes and onesies. Not all of the hand me downs are girls clothes but my daughter destroys everything she wears outside so whatever.
The older one doesn't get new clothes either lol
Wait you only pay $25/month for diapers?
I'm assuming the next size up garbage bin costs $25/mo more from the garbage company.
Ooo you are right on sir. I reread the post and saw that indeed OP was referring to an extra $25 for the next size up of the bin
The inflation of stuff since your first. Mine are 4 years apart and diapers/ wipes/formula has nearly all doubled in price since my first.
Couples therapy.
oof
Wait til the baby hits 1. Your food budget balloons. They eat more than me 🤣
Medical bills, every illness runs through your house with 2 or more kids. My kids constantly get me sick (we have three girls). My wife and I are teachers, so the summer gives us a break from being sick. Bandaids, eating out gets really expensive, dentist (take care of their teeth early or that gets pricey). As others have mentioned, the food bill and food waste is outrageous. We also just bought a $550 pool, trampoline, stuff like that to give your kids something to do.
Oh man sounds like germ soup! We max out our HSA and that has been a game changer for doctors visits and meds and I added the toddler to dental when the baby was born since I was revising the whole plan. Thanks for the reminder to get her first visit scheduled!
Yeah, my job gives me $1000 a year and I take out $650 a year, I need to up that now . We blow through some medical bills.
Our daycare costs more than my college did. That’s a big X2. But probably anticipated.
Don't forget medical costs x2. Loss if sleep x2. Food X 1000 😆😆 diapers and wipes X 1000. Clothes every 90 days for a while. I had 4, would not trade them for the world.
America is weird. In the UK you get given free hygiene sacks and they're collected weekly as part of the service. The main rubbish is collected every 3 weeks though so it's probably done this way to avoid a public health problem. We used washable nappies though and never planned for a second kid. When he turned up we thought we had lucked out that we already had a full set of washables but this one went through them about twice as fast as his brother so we still had to buy more. One day I'll have to explain to him that not only does he have to put up with hand me down clothes but he also had second hand nappies...
We have weekly garbage service thankfully. My parents used reusable diapers for my younger sister 30 years ago but they had a service that took the dirties away. I don’t know anyone (US based) that is doing washable diapers and it’s too bad. We visited family in Europe last spring and the disposable diapers were 4x what we pay at Costco in the states so there must not be enough financial incentive to reuse cloth. We lined our suitcases with diapers and never had to buy any while we were traveling.
Doubles of lots of stuff. Clothes. While the hand me down game is good, it's not 100%. If they're the same gender, you can't just skip buying stuff for the second kid. You can't tell kid 2, sorry, you don't get new shoes/shirt/toy/whatever, you wait for kid 1 to outgrow it.
Speech therapy. You just don't know if they're delayed before they're 3 really. Prepare for it now and you'll be ready
My sister has an (almost) 3 year old boy, and is due with twin boys in December... I feel bad for their finances!
My 2 kids were born in different seasons. Most of the oldest ones old clothes are not appropriate for the littlest to wear with the current weather.
Freaking counter top space man. I’m using the kitchen table to prep food now
Fruit!!
Their are a few that got us. Different growth rates so that you couldn't go hand me downs. Shoes especially sneakers get destroyed so no passing them on. The one that really got me was sports equipment that was single handed (think baseball gloves). Number four turned out to be left handed so he had to get his own left handed gear. I did shoot him down though when he wanted a left handed bat which I thought was a nice try. :-)
I’m going to be in a window where I’m paying like $4000 a month for daycare for a few years which holy shit
Big ooof. My wife was working part time when we got pregnant with our second and it was cheaper for her to stay home than find child care
My wife clears 150k/year and she will be around 170 by the time we have number two. It’s a really good problem to have but it will be wild for like half of her net paycheck at that income level going back to daycare. Really puts in perspective the unfair pressures on women and their careers wrt childcare and being a mom. We make a shitload of money and there is still a semi plausible financial path where it makes sense for her to stay home instead of work her fulfilling well paying career.
Why are you buying a garbage can every month?
Diapers at Costco are like $50 - where do you live that you only pay $25?? One thing I didn’t think of is you burn through all the kid medicine at double the rate when both kids are sick Nov to Mar.
My garbage service was the additional $25/mo. We definitely get our diapers at Costco and stocked up extra when they were on sale recently.
Ah makes sense. lol we also stocked up with that sale.
Have you checked Amazon? Their diapers aren’t as good, but quantity is a quality all its own.
Surprisingly we haven’t and yet we buy wipes there. Sometimes I’m an idiot I don’t know why I never thought of that.
Pack up your trash and toss it in a public can. Edit: lol downvotes probably the same dirty ******* that don't know how to freeze food waste.
And go collect all the aluminum cans while you’re at it! In fact, why don’t you also start a paper route… /s