Fantastic Four

When it came down to chores in the house as a kid, I sometimes wished under my breath that I had more than one sibling. I'd be thinking that my parents should have just started winning eleven for the numerous "do this, come and buy this, bring my bag for me, wash the plates." When it came to some other aspects of our family, I realized that having a small family has its own perks.

By default, you only get to have two players on a game console at a time. That is, I would be player one most of the time and my brother as player two. We'd enjoy multiplayer games together, especially football. But have you seen when there are about five boys playing together? It's usually fun, but someone's going to have to wait for a long time for their turn. Imagine such a large family...

Well, it goes deeper than sharing amenities and a house. It goes as deep as the relationship with parents and their presence in the lives of each child. I'm not exactly sure how it is in other families that are large, but I have seen how much easier it has been for my parents to worry about just two rather than eleven.

One of us had it pretty rough one time. It was even rougher for our parents because they had to put in even more time, effort, resources, and love into being there for their child. It was in that time that I realised that, if we had a larger family, it may have been different.

There are times, however, that I would wonder what it could have been like with more family members at home. There's usually more drama and all when there are more people around. I mean, we have a full house every now and then, and it is totally different. Thankfully, it's not always like that, because we aren't even dramatic people in my family, and we thrive just fine with our company.

The older we get, the more we tend to leave home often. As small as my family is—just my parents, myself, and my brother—we're not always all at home together. That's fine and normal, but I cannot imagine what it's like to have to miss a lot more people every now and then because one is in Canada, another in Scotland, and things like that.

Perhaps another thing about small families is that the family tree doesn't end up looking like tangled yarn. I don't know how large families do it, but it should get a point when someone has to make a list of people in the extended family as it expands.

I guess every family would have their own dynamic that they operate with. Might work well for some, but I have always loved the number of family members in our household. When the time comes to start mine, I would like to keep the number just as low. Let's not even begin to talk about billings.