Family size that is! What were you expecting? 😉

How many children do you have?

In our house it’s three, a trio of trouble or triple the work fun.

This morning I was looking at booking the Harry Potter studio tour and again found that we are an awkward sized family. Family tickets cater for the perceived average family size of two adults and two children, or as I’m frequently noticing these day one adult and three children – which is great for the days I don’t like my Husband!?! 😉

This got me thinking, are we as a family that atypical?
I know lots of families with three. I know families with four, a good friend has five, I also know families with six, seven and nine children. Come on I’m paling in comparison here!
A quick look at the office for national statistics site shows that yes I am far from the norm. Current figures suggest that only one in seven families has three or more children. My guess is they must all live in my town! 😉

So are the corporate big guys correct with their definition of family either? Turns out no, the decline of the traditional 2.4 family had lead us to a national average of 1.7 dependant children per family.

As for me I’ve always wanted three. With an emotional and challenging start to our family life we would have been quite happy with one, luckily however things started working as they should do and we were blessed with three bundles of joy in three years. Yes I do deserve a medal. 😉
Truthfully I wanted three as it’s a little unconventional – let’s shake things up a bit. So many people told us we should stop at two, especially as we had the highly coveted ‘one of each’ package. I hate being told what to do. 😉

The implications of such family size are at times frustrating; awkward ticket sales trying to work the best value from ticket combinations, we’ve never stayed in a hotel as a family as whenever we have looked into this we would have to split the family – doubling the expense and halving the fun. It’s a good job we like camping so much!
Like any family with young children we would love to go to Disneyland Paris but accommodation options for us are limited and to be honest look a bit crap.

I of course expect to pay more for having more children, but what I would like to see is a bit more consideration to keep us together. At the moment the children are small and it’s nice to all be together.

So we may as parents be outnumbered by our offspring and I may have more children than I do hands to hold them, but I love them all dearly. You couldn’t get three more different children in terms of appearance and character but that makes our family life all the richer and exciting.

We agree with De La Soul, three is the magic number.

How many Children do you have? Have you any positive experiences with companies that cater for or welcome larger families? I’d love to hear any similar experiences from families large or small.