Would You Rather Episode 1

Have you ever seen those surveys online? Would you rather live in the on the beach or in the mountains? I think we all have. Well, today we took on a few of those questions and discussed our answers.

It is always fun to think about, if I could have things be different, what would I choose? For most things I think we would choose the lives we have over and over. But how fun would it be to live in a place totally different from where we are.

What do you think of our answers today? What would you choose? Drop us a comment on our social pages or on the website. We would love to hear from you.

Do you have questions you would like to hear us answer? We're open to ideas. Send us a private message and we'll put together another of these episodes in the future.

Have you heard our episode on the Trad Wife Trend? Listen to that HERE

Transcript

Music is by Oliver Massa. It is called Weekend Chores

Recap

Having a maid is preferred over having someone to do laundry or a cook

Preferences for living in town or in the country can change over time

The number of states visited can vary greatly among individuals

Having triplets can be challenging, but some prefer it over spacing out children

Vans and SUVs have different advantages and disadvantages

Chapter

00:00 Answering Common Internet Questions

06:08 The Town vs. Country Debate

13:19 Counting the States Visited

Transcript

Ellyn (00:06.797)

Hi listeners. Today we are going to do something different and answer some common internet questions like things that might be burning in your mind that you might wonder about us. And before we get started, if you have answers to any of these, we would love to hear about them. So please drop us a comment either on our website or on one of our social media accounts. Really, we'd love to hear from you. All right.

First one, I'm asking you, Lauren. First one. Would you rather have a cook, a maid, or someone to do your laundry and why?

Lauren (00:47.822)

Okay. I've thought about this. I've definitely seen this question several times on the internet and it always puzzles me when someone chooses something other than what I choose, which is a maid. A person who does your laundry is just doing one thing. And again, the person who does your cooking is just doing one thing and maybe not cleaning up after themselves. That would be a negative in my opinion. No, I'm definitely picking maid. I love to cook and even though I don't really enjoy doing laundry, having someone mop my floors and clean my toilets definitely is better than doing laundry. How about you?

Ellyn (01:35.437)

Mm -hmm.

Ellyn (01:39.147)

Completely agree. I would choose a maid every single time. I also really like to cook. I don't like to clean up from cooking and a maid would do that. And yeah, you didn't go there in your head, did you?

Lauren (01:48.462)

Oh yeah, that's true. I didn't even think about that. No, I didn't. I just imagined me doing it.

Ellyn (01:56.875)

Right. So if I had someone to come along behind me and clean up my messes and my family's messes, I would be all over that. And honestly, I almost feel like a maid should do your laundry too. I feel like that should be the maid's job. And if I had a maid, I'd tell her so.

Lauren (02:06.126)

Mm -hmm.

Lauren (02:16.59)

From what? From what I've heard of maids in like, I actually have some friends that clean other people's houses. So they're kind of maids and they don't charge extra technically for laundry, but they, charge by the hour. So if they're there waiting for the laundry to get done or whatever. I mean I imagine they put in the laundry first and then do the other work, but if it takes some extra time then they get extra money for it. So not everyone has someone do their laundry because it does take extra time.

Ellyn (02:52.489)

Right.

Ellyn (02:56.01)

Yeah,  a maid would change the sheets on my bed, which I don't like to do. So that would be big for me. And I guess if she's going to stay longer to finish the laundry, I'll just wash the sheets myself. But if she changed the sheets, I'd be happy.

Lauren (03:10.542)

Yeah, you put those back on my own bed, it's not really a problem. My husband always helps. We're a team when it comes to getting those sheets back on there, but getting the sheets on the kids beds, which I have only recently discovered the wonder, I guess, of having your kids make their own beds up there. They aren't good at it, but I don't really care. Like they have learned to make their bed, but getting a fitted sheet on a top bunk is not easy. That's not some easy stuff right there. I remember doing it when I was a kid and it wasn't easy then and it's not easy now for them. But now I

Ellyn (03:59.593)

If anything, it's harder now because I'm old.

Lauren (04:04.302)

Oh yeah, I just stopped doing it. But from the floor, which I just don't really like climbing up into their bed, into the top bunk, I'm always afraid it's just gonna break and that's gonna be it. But, so I do it - right, exactly. I do it standing up. And it's not - it's not easy then, either.

Ellyn (04:18.344)

For the bed and you.

Lauren (04:29.23)

I will say I think it's easier if you're tall enough to just reach up and put them on without climbing in than it is actually being in the bed. Because you're in the way... it is hard. Yes, it's really hard. It is. But anyway, if the maid would put new sheets on the kids' beds, I'd be willing to pay extra for that.

Ellyn (04:39.846)

Mm -hmm, making a bed that you're currently in. That's the hardest thing ever.

Ellyn (04:57.637)

Right. You go climb up there.

Lauren (04:58.862)

But in this scenario, one of these three things is free. So yeah, the free thing that I would do would be a maid.  I've seen people pick both cook and having someone do their laundry. And I just, I can't understand that. Makes no sense to me.

Ellyn (05:24.164)

Right. Yep. Unless you have a really, really large family, then I don't know, I might pick laundry if I had, you know, seven kids.

Lauren (05:36.334)

Maybe. But I still wouldn't pick food. I guess if you couldn't cook, that would be a really nice thing to have. But right now I feel like I just want it the way I want it. And other people aren't going to do it exactly like I want it. So yeah. Next question.

Ellyn (05:39.971)

I definitely wouldn't pick chef either.

Ellyn (05:51.171)

This is

Ellyn (05:58.243)

Yeah.

Lauren (06:02.222)

would you rather live in town or in the country?

Ellyn (06:08.899)

For me, this answer has changed over time. when we first had our big kids, we lived out in the country and I used to pack the kids into the car with a stroller and go to town to walk with them and go and explore. And, it was fine, but I couldn't walk on our own little country road. So when we sold that house and moved to where we are now, we really wanted to live in town where we had sidewalks and be able to just step out our front door and go for a walk and go to the playground, go to the park, that sort of thing. And it has been great. We love where we live. It's a great place to raise a family. But as my family has gotten older, my priorities have changed somewhat. I want to be able to have a bigger garden, I want to be able to have more animals. So this in town life isn't really suiting our needs anymore. So at this point in my life, I think I would like to move out of town and be more in the country. But I've always enjoyed my in town life. So it's not that I'm not happy with it. It's just that my priorities and my needs have shifted some. How about you?

Lauren (07:34.19)

The short answer is country for me, but I wouldn't. So we don't live in a city and I haven't really had that experience. I think if you asked our parents, they would say I have, but I haven't really. Like not in a big city where you can walk to anything that you need. No, I've never had that experience. But if I was going to say town, which is kind of where we live now, or country, which is definitely not where we live, I would say country. And, again, it's kind of for the same reasons. I, I definitely get the not being able to walk down the road. Um, I've seen that, you know, our parents have that and I mean, they don't really though. They have traffic, but it's not bad enough that you can't walk down the street, walk down their road. And here we do have our sidewalks and we can walk to the grocery store, which is really nice, but we can't really walk to anything else. So we have kind of the worst  of both worlds. Like we can't, we have traffic and we live

close to a major road, but we can only walk to the grocery store. You can't really walk to anything else.

Ellyn (09:08.35)

That's it.

Lauren (09:10.862)

And if we did live in the country, I think I would want to have a little bit more land. And so if we lived on the busier road, we could just walk around the yard, which is what my mother -in -law does.  they have a really large piece of land and she just walks around the outside of it. And that's how she goes on her walks. And then when she needs to go anywhere, she just gets in the car to go.

Ellyn (09:40.382)

Yep. I think that this topic, I would imagine for most people, it does kind of change over time. And then some people go the other way. I have several friends who have lived in more country setting, but they miss the amenities of living in a town. And my town is pretty small.

Lauren (09:52.846)

Mm -hmm.

Ellyn (10:09.438)

We don't have a whole lot. In fact, it is a stretch for us to walk to the grocery store. We can do it, but it takes a little time. So we have sidewalks and we have a lower speed limit right here in town. But the amenities are few where we are. It is nice to have sidewalks. But I feel like a lot of people.

Lauren (10:35.438)

Yeah, I do love that.

Ellyn (10:40.574)

myself included, long for what they don't have.

Lauren (10:44.334)

Right. Yeah, exactly. There's always something. Yeah. Um, we've lived in much more, like when the house is much closer together and no one really had much of a yard at all. And we could walk to like the farmer's market and the park and you know, all that kind of stuff, which I left that out. We can, we can walk to the park too,

Ellyn (10:45.886)

It's nice to have. Right. There's.

Lauren (11:14.894)

It still wasn't really city. It just, I don't know why the houses were so close together there, but,  I have always longed to have the kind of life for my kids that I had growing up, getting to run around on. It wasn't we lived close to my grandparents and we got to run around on their land.

Ellyn (11:22.905)

It's just the way it was.

Lauren (11:44.398)

a lot too. So yeah, we had a really big amount of space to run around on.

Ellyn (11:52.696)

Yep.

Lauren (11:57.07)

And I want that for my kids too.

Ellyn (11:57.559)

 that's part of the reason I've always enjoyed going to our parents because while they don't have that all the time, they do get to have that sometimes when we go visit. Our parents have a little creek that runs by their house and for myself when I was a kid and I know for Lauren when she was a kid and also for our kids.

Lauren (12:06.926)

Yeah.

Ellyn (12:27.031)

great adventures happen in that creek. It's fun. You can catch frogs and salamanders and the water runs sometimes. Yeah, I was always afraid of this one because there's spiders in there.

Lauren (12:34.382)

It had a tunnel under the road.

Lauren (12:39.534)

I liked it. I played my flute in there. I'm sure the neighbors were like, it's happening again.

Ellyn (12:44.022)

Nope.

So they did get that experience just not all the time. The country life.

Lauren (12:59.15)

making it all the more fun because they aren't used to it. They don't take it for granted, I guess. They really look forward to going.

Ellyn (13:04.854)

Right.

Right.

Lauren (13:10.734)

Alright, on to the next question.

Ellyn (13:11.03)

So Lauren, how many of the United States have you gone to?

Lauren (13:19.246)

So before this episode, I counted and it's 23. I think I got them all. I don't know. We drove through, like straight through a whole bunch of these. We've driven from Georgia to Texas when we live down there. So I've been in all the states in between, which honestly aren't really that many, but I can't really say that we probably got out of the car to go to the bathroom or something in a few of them. I didn't live there. Yeah, or, you know, stay for a weekend even. But we did camp several times in Tennessee and Georgia and Florida, South Carolina, not North Carolina.

Ellyn (13:55.35)

You put foot on all of them, but maybe didn't visit anything.

Lauren (14:17.55)

But yeah, all the rest of the states I visited with the army either driving through or flying in and then flying back out.

Ellyn (14:29.814)

So you saw the air.

Lauren (14:30.798)

Oh, I've been to Illinois too. 24.

Ellyn (14:35.062)

Heheheheh

Aha! I have, much like Lauren, a lot of the states that I have visited were ones that I drove through. I didn't count these ones in my count, but I've flown over many, many states and looked down upon them as I was flying at altitude. But my, I've been, yeah, those didn't count though.

Lauren (15:03.374)

Right. And whatever you could see.

No, I didn't.

Ellyn (15:08.534)

I've been to 25 and I do think, I think I got them all. I, a good many of them are ones that I have just driven through. My husband lives in the Midwest and of course being stationed down in Florida. So I drove back and forth. Those States quite a number of times I've driven out to the Midwest and back several times or more than several, many times.

I haven't lived in all of them. We should count out the number of states that we've actually lived in Lauren. I didn't think to do that before the episode. Yeah, it is. And especially for people who honestly before, for me at least before my 18th birthday, I think I'd gone to three states.

Lauren (15:44.59)

now because that's actually kind of impressive too.

Lauren (16:01.806)

I'd gone to Canada, too.

Ellyn (16:07.126)

I did not go to Canada before I grew up.

Lauren (16:10.126)

I had.

Well, I went with the youth group at church.

Ellyn (16:16.822)

 Yeah, I think before my 18th birthday, I'd been to three states. 

Lauren (16:24.558)

Oh, and we went on our senior class trip. You didn't go to Canada for your class trip?

Ellyn (16:30.102)

No, we went to New York City.

Lauren (16:32.686)

Oh, we went there too. We went with the art club. I went to New York. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, moving right along.

Ellyn (16:43.67)

So the Air Force and the Army took us all kinds of places and that's where most of that count comes from.

Lauren (16:54.766)

If not for the Air Force and the Army, we probably would still just live right there. And I've only gone to two or three states.

Ellyn (17:03.318)

Right.

Lauren (17:05.038)

Maybe. I don't know. All right, would you rather have triplets or three kids in three years?

Ellyn (17:14.134)

Now, I really thought about this one before we started. Oh my word, I don't know. I think I'd like to have triplets.

Lauren (17:27.758)

I'd rather have triplets too.  I've done the thing where you have a child before, like another child before your first one learns how to walk. And it's exhausting. She was so big. So like all the things that I had to do still with her, it was like, it was like adding another eight.

Ellyn (17:27.766)

I - but I don't know. Yeah?

Lauren (17:57.198)

10, 12, 14, you know, he just grew so fast, pound weight onto everything that I had to do with, with my daughter. So I don't think that I could do three of those. Just thinking about it makes my stomach feel a little bit queasy. But I feel like I could manage triplets. I don't know.

Ellyn (18:17.43)

Hehehehe.

Ellyn (18:23.478)

I

Lauren (18:23.502)

because I'm not trying to downplay the difficulties of having real twins either.

There's a lot of difficulties just thinking about nursing three babies is almost enough to put me on the back to the three kids in three years. So I don't know.

Ellyn (18:41.558)

I have a friend who adopted twins when they came home from the hospital to her house. And I remember it was right after we started our homeschool co -op. And so she came back, you know, you spend, when you have kids now, you're supposed to spend the first month at home. So after that month, she came back.

So they don't get sick, I guess, I don't know. And so she came back and she said, I haven't slept since I came home because if one of them is sleeping, the other one is always awake. And if the other one is sleeping, then the other one is now woken up. And so we haven't slept in a month. And so adding a third one to that, I don't know. I'm just not gonna have either and just be satisfied with the family that God gave me, okay?

Lauren (19:36.686)

No. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I like that. However, there is always the, like, we're not done having babies, technically, because all the babies that we had are gonna have babies too.

Lauren (19:56.462)

So yeah, that's, I guess that just never ends.

Ellyn (20:02.422)

No.

Lauren (20:05.582)

But I, you know, as grandparents, you don't have to deal with a lot of the more brutal realities of other people's kids.

Ellyn (20:13.462)

You're there as an assistant, not a...

Lauren (20:16.398)

Decorative.

Ellyn (20:19.595)

primary player so much, I think, in the grandparenting role. And I mean, thinking about it, you know, when my kids do have kids of their own, I feel like I will be there as a an intensive assistant or as much as they want me around. I mean, I won't insist. But if they want me around, I would be there for all of it. 

Lauren (20:21.198)

Right, right, right, right.

Ellyn (20:49.194)

just as an extra set of hands for them. Not so much a, you know, if I don't take care of this, it's not going to live sort of thing. It's like, I'm here to help you take care of this so that it'll live.

Lauren (21:01.39)

Right.

Right. Now I do remember when mom came when my son was born, who was a difficult baby. he's better now. But as a baby, he wouldn't let anyone hold him but me. When Steve tried to hold him, it just, it wasn't good. And Like no one was allowed to hold him, but me. So that made for a very tired mom. And I remember one evening and I don't know, maybe mom smelled the same as me cause she could hold him too. And I remember one evening when he just wouldn't go to sleep and I just broke down and started crying. And mom's like, go and go to sleep. I will manage things here. And she did, and she stayed up until like 2 a .m. that night, and I fell asleep and I fell asleep and didn't wake up and I was like, Mom, what happened? I didn't think you were gonna stay up this late. And she's like, it's fine. He's just starting to kind of wake up a little bit, but he's not really awake yet. And

Ellyn (22:10.44)

That little stinker.

Lauren (22:30.126)

I'm going to go to bed now. I'll see you tomorrow. Late in the morning.

Ellyn (22:36.23)

Heheheheh

Lauren (22:38.093)

But yeah, so she was a major player there.

Ellyn (22:43.142)

Right. And that's the grandparent experience is giving the parents a break so that they can come back and be parents again without losing their minds.

Lauren (22:55.278)

Right, exactly, because I think I was on the cusp. My mind was almost gone.

Ellyn (22:58.95)

Must have sleep.

Lauren (23:03.694)

I haven't slept in 39 days.

Lauren (23:10.03)

But anyway, all right, next question. Would you rather have, I know, would you rather have a van or an SUV?

Ellyn (23:14.469)

A little lighter now.

Ellyn (23:22.468)

I think years ago I would have said a van and this is another of those like the town and country thing. I think this is another of those things that changes over time. Did you see what I did there? Town and country. Anyway, at this point in my life, I think a van, but I imagine before too much longer we'll switch to an SUV, but I do like my van. You?

Lauren (23:29.742)

Yeah.

Lauren (23:36.75)

Yeah, amazing.

Lauren (23:50.766)

So, mine is also a short answer. It's, I would rather have an SUV because they have a greater towing capacity and they would open up a couple of doors for us, but they cost so much more money for an SUV equal to the size of a minivan or bigger. And...

Ellyn (24:14.212)

Mm -hmm.

Lauren (24:17.134)

Yeah, that actually kind of priced us out of that market. We're conservative, you know, when it comes to how much money we spend on a vehicle, and I just wasn't willing to spend that much. But for you guys, a smaller SUV, because my husband drives a smaller SUV, that's, it's certainly not more than a van. If you got the right one. And I

Ellyn (24:43.044)

Right. Right.

Lauren (24:46.254)

I like that car. I like how it's a little bit higher off the ground. My first baby that I brought home from the hospital went into that SUV and it's got bigger tires. So it was much easier to get the kid in and out of the car seat. A little harder for a little kid to climb in and out of, though.

Ellyn (25:07.139)

And I think that's why I like the van for this stage in our lives. When I have little kids, as long as I have little kids, I like having a sliding door. It just opens up a lot more space to maneuver, like a car seat in and out of or putting a kid into when you, especially when you have a carried kid, not in a car seat anymore. It just gives you more space to maneuver them into the car seat that's already in the vehicle. I like my van. They're not cool. They're mom cars. Who cares? I do like my van.

Lauren (25:51.886)

Mom limo. Yeah, I have a van too, and I do really like it. I like that the doors and the hatch, which I guess all hatches open and close on a button now, but I like that they, the doors open and close by remote. That's really nice. Like when you've got really little kids who just can't manage a door handle yet, I...

Ellyn (26:11.586)

Mm -hmm. It is.

Lauren (26:18.702)

I really liked it. It's actually kind of slackening off now because I realized my kids couldn't open a door to a car. So I was like, okay, I'm not opening that for you anymore. You're going to have to figure it out. It's like have five year old, a five year old should be able to open a car door. Now get out there and open it.

Ellyn (26:31.714)

Toughen up, buttercup.

Lauren (26:42.734)

We really love to answer these kinds of questions and have these kinds of conversations. So I think we'll be doing this again. We have some questions that we didn't quite get to today. We ran out of time a little bit here, but we will be doing this again. So if you have any questions that you'd like to add or answer, we'd love to hear your answers and post them in the next episode.

just pass them on to our social media on this episode or send them to our website. Alright, thanks guys. Until next time.