As you might have noticed, there was no Friday review this week. The combo of the tail-end of our busy season at the Airstream biz + this pregnancy + buying less overall has meant that my reviews have slowed down, which I think is a good thing. It really isn’t sustainable to be buying 3 new items a week to review (even if some of it is free on credit or eventually returned because it doesn’t work out). I wonder if I should try to do a different kind of post on Friday. Though I feel like the things I want to talk about (living with less, zero or low waste, how to be productive, wellness, etc.) have all been done to death by a lot of other blogs. Would you guys be interested in hearing my (admittedly non-expert) take on these things? Maybe a post about saving money or investing money since I’m saving money by buying less (so what do I do with my savings?—so far pretty much nothing so I probably need to improve that part of my life asap).

Anyway I also wanted to mention last week (but since the post was long enough as it was, I decided to save this for later) but I had made my peace about not having kids a couple of years ago. I was sad for about a year when we tried and couldn’t get pregnant. I went to a fertility doctor where we went though the first round of blood tests/sperm tests and nothing was abnormal. The next steps were imaging and xrays, which we decided to put on hold since we were starting a business. I’m sure then we would have found out it was the uterine fibroids that was preventing the pregnancy. But then I decided that my line/my boundary at that time for how far I would go to get pregnant would be natural or not at all (no hormones, no IVF, no surgery, etc.) . I even wrote out a post titled “I probably won’t have any kids and I’m happy with that” or something like that—it was in my drafts folder and I couldn’t quite get it right so I put it on hold. But after reading both Grechen’s post and Garance’s post about not having kids, I wanted to tell my own child-free-by-choice story. I also read through this book of essays from authors with no children. And after all that I knew I could be happy even without a child. Of course, now I am pregnant and I’m also happy. But don’t let anyone tell you that your life is better either or way or that your happiness level depends on a child. You will find happiness no matter what because there’s a lot of things to be grateful for in living. And just because your life doesn’t look like everyone else’s, doesn’t mean it’s in any way less than.