I've always daydreamed of one day getting married and settling into a modest and preferably cheap house somewhere, good enough for starting out. Something like one-bedroom, one-bathroom flat similar to those of small families in Japan. We can have maybe a tv and a small refrigerator, a stove and a washing machine, and maybe also a desktop computer. A small Christmas tree during the holidays. Just the essentials.

Then we'd work our way up. First save up for a better tv, so that neither my husband nor I get cranky when the old, cheap one conks out after a long day. Then we get maybe a nice couch or a sturdier washing machine. Or maybe even a slow cooker so that whoever's turn it is (I'm going to insist that me and my husband take turns preparing dinner) won't have to stress about getting it ready before the other comes home. Of course, we'll certainly have to set some money aside for a car. Nothing fancy, something like a Hyundai Accent or a Kia Rio, maybe if we're lucky a Honda Civic. Just something that'll get us to work without the hassle of public transportation.

Then, hopefully, once we've been promoted enough (me as senior professor in UP lol and my husband as, well, whatever high position) or once we have enough money in the bank, we can start planning a baby. We're going to need a yaya for her (for now I'll assume in my fantasies that our firstborn is a girl). We might start getting a little crowded, but in the meantime the yaya can sleep in the couch. And then, after we've adjusted to the new arrangement, and when the child starts getting a little bit too old to sleep with mommy and daddy, we might find it necessary to move into a bigger house. Of course, we would have prepared for that from the start (which is why we first had to get promoted enough and had to have enough money in the bank).

So then we move to a bigger place, maybe a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in a decent subdivision, still quite modest, but good enough for a growing family. Our daughter will have to start attending school by this time. And maybe we might have to invest in an educational plan for our baby so we wouldn't have to worry about paying for her high school education when the time comes. Must think in the long term.

And maybe, after settling in, we might think of adding another blessing to the family, anyway there's room enough in the house for two little children now. Hopefully it's a boy this time so that we can end there.

And in between all these there are Christmas visits to my parents and Holy Week visits to his, we never miss those.

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In real life, of course, it probably won't happen that way. But I notice that I really do fancy that domestic fantasy I've outlined above. Sometimes, walking along the kitchen ware section of Abenson, I find myself searching for the sturdiest-looking cheap stove I can find and think to myself, that'd be okay for our little house. Or when I wander into the electronics section of Western, I start to think, that small tv is perfectly fine, as long as we still enjoy what we're watching.

Even in the Sims, whenever I create a new family, I tend to avoid the motherlode cheat and try to play them from the bottom up, using money they've earned to get better furniture, to renovate the house, get rich and make babies.

But I really do wonder though how my life will turn out. At the moment it's pretty scary. What if I make the wrong choices? What if I don't get to achieve my goals? What if I don't become good enough a professor or an economist to succeed? I might never get to that point where me and my family get to save up enough for a bigger house (knowing more or less that Filipinos have a bad record when it comes to savings--very low relative savings rate). Our earnings might only get eaten away by bills and taxes. I remember, now that I've realized it, that sometimes I get a figure in my head, like P15,000/mo. How much would the water and electricity bill cost for a small house...Will P5,000 be enough for all the bills? Will we be able to save at least P2,000 a month??

Ugh. I'm such a geek. But seriously, these things do bother me once in a while. And it's kind of frightening that I don't have any definite answers.