We did this approximately by accident. We had a kid, and separately had a habit of letting our friends crash in our spare bedrooms, and one of them did enough caretaking (letting us SLEEP!) that we were like “wait… if she leaves… that will hit the kid like a divorce” and arranged to keep her forever. Now we live with her and her fiancée and additional Spare Room Friends and a second kid, and we are very crowded in our large house and don’t have room for any more Spare Room Friends which is very sad, and plot to purchase neighboring houses as soon as they come on the market and knock down intervening fencing.
We really like this arrangement and so do the kids, and it’s been especially wonderful during lockdown since we can do well-attended in-bubble dinners and D&D and TV nights. It might be hard to do on purpose, especially if you want to do it before you actually have a kid for people to get attached to. Finding one compatible coparent who is committed to being in it for the duration of at least one childhood no matter what kind of kid you wind up with is already pretty hard. But we know a family who invited in a Spare Room Friend expressly on the expectation that the SRF would help take care of their child, which seems pretty doable, and if things didn’t work out they could presumably swap for a different SRF.
So I guess my advice is acquire at least one spare room and invite a friend who likes kids to live in it and see if they and your baby get along.
Thanks! This gives me a lot of hope, that it can happen by accident. I would love to hear if you end up purchasing adjacent property, or if you would consider moving all together to another spot!
We tried to buy a place around the corner (not right adjacent, but no crossing streets, so we could have let pretty small kids walk it alone), but we could only afford to lowball it and didn’t get it. We don’t want to move because moving is horrible but if the place burned down or something we would probably all or mostly all move together.
We did this approximately by accident. We had a kid, and separately had a habit of letting our friends crash in our spare bedrooms, and one of them did enough caretaking (letting us SLEEP!) that we were like “wait… if she leaves… that will hit the kid like a divorce” and arranged to keep her forever. Now we live with her and her fiancée and additional Spare Room Friends and a second kid, and we are very crowded in our large house and don’t have room for any more Spare Room Friends which is very sad, and plot to purchase neighboring houses as soon as they come on the market and knock down intervening fencing.
We really like this arrangement and so do the kids, and it’s been especially wonderful during lockdown since we can do well-attended in-bubble dinners and D&D and TV nights. It might be hard to do on purpose, especially if you want to do it before you actually have a kid for people to get attached to. Finding one compatible coparent who is committed to being in it for the duration of at least one childhood no matter what kind of kid you wind up with is already pretty hard. But we know a family who invited in a Spare Room Friend expressly on the expectation that the SRF would help take care of their child, which seems pretty doable, and if things didn’t work out they could presumably swap for a different SRF.
So I guess my advice is acquire at least one spare room and invite a friend who likes kids to live in it and see if they and your baby get along.
Thanks! This gives me a lot of hope, that it can happen by accident. I would love to hear if you end up purchasing adjacent property, or if you would consider moving all together to another spot!
We tried to buy a place around the corner (not right adjacent, but no crossing streets, so we could have let pretty small kids walk it alone), but we could only afford to lowball it and didn’t get it. We don’t want to move because moving is horrible but if the place burned down or something we would probably all or mostly all move together.