November 23 officially kicked off what I foresee is going to be a long and steady new phase in our family: braces. Man those suckers are pricey. When you have a baby or two or three or four you don't really think about the long-term financial repercussions. Well maybe some people do, but we were too young and stupid. Young and stupid is actually a really great thing. It helps you make unbelievably huge and serious choices fairly easily, which if you waited to make when you were older and wiser, you might not make. Had we pondered the financial realities of child rearing without the benefit of knowing first hand how fantastic having a family was, we may have tucked our tails and run. But we didn't, and now we have four. When pondering having a baby we thought about the doctor bill and buying a car seat and crib. We really lowballed it. Because, it turns out, babies grow into toddlers and toddlers grow into kids that destroy a pair of jeans in under two hours (Anders holds the new record for this in our house). And even if my children were precious little angels who never blew holes in their knees and didn't spill everything they eat down every shirt they own I would still have to buy them a new wardrobe on a seasonal basis. We have discovered over the last eleven years that one thing kids do pretty predictably is grow out of their clothes. And then there are the billions of dollars you spend on gifts like Bakugons and Littlest Pet Shop toys for the endless birthday parties our children get invited to. And lets not forget the library fines, because if you have kids and go to the library you are bound to rack up a bill (albeit probably not forty dollars every few weeks)*. Let's throw extra curricular activities into the mix: piano lessons, soccer, swimming, art, dance, etc. Holy crap! And then they start having real-people appetites and you start fainting at the check out counter when the cashier tells you your weekly grocery bill is well over one hundred dollars (and you will be completely out of food in under a week even with this massive cart of food). And we haven't even begun to imagine how we will get therm through college. Anyway, the point is kids are expensive. But you don't even realize it at first. The cost of kids just sneaks up on you. And then reality hits hard at about the point their cute little baby teeth fall out and suddenly they have a mouthful of large funky teeth that simply don't fit in their little mouths. And then reality really begins to dawn on you. This is the point you start to ponder why you didn't try to convince your husband that he should have become an orthodontist. Because for the next eight to ten years one of our kids will be in braces, which means all our money for the foreseeable future is going to a man who probably owns a yacht, three vacation homes, and whose kids got their teeth straightened for free. Oh well. We love Lucy and will miss her snaggle tooth. Our villa in Italy will just have to wait until after they all have straight teeth and have graduated from college. Besides Lucy, Tucker, Anders, and Clara are better than just about anything and worth every penny (at least most of the time).
And now, without further ado, I give you the beginning of the orthodontic phase at the Hastings' household:
*It's a funny story, ask me about it sometime.
