How'd we get here?

Long time readers of this blog know my husband and I are slowly and surely moving towards fatherhood.  There's no baby in the works, but we're lining things up.  The environment in which we will be raising our future children in is very different from the environment I was raised in, which bothers me a bit.

For example, most of our friends with children have help from a nanny.  I understand if you have two careers and you need weekday help from a nanny, but we have friends that are in single income households and they too have help from a nanny.  We went to a barbecue two Saturdays ago and one family showed up: mother, father, children, and the nanny.

Another example, we were asking our friends in the 'sac how much candy we need to buy to get ready for Halloween, and our friend told us to buy lots of candy because our neighborhood is visited by lots of (she switched to a whisper:) "apartment kids."  She went on to tell a sweet story about a kid knocking on her door at 8 PM last year excited that her porch light was still on because his mom just got home from work and everyone else had stopped handing out candy.  Our friend emptied her candy bowl into his sack.

Our bubble is full of kind and generous friends.  No one is being mean, but the environment is unrecognizable from the environment I grew up in...part of  me wants to sell out and move back to my hometown to raise our children.  That's not really going to happen, which means I will need to need to poke holes in our bubble.  I want my kids to know that kids who live in apartments should not be labeled "apartment kids."

Now I know why my father always made me work the hottest hardest jobs in the summers growing up.