What is the "ideal" number of children

What is the ideal number of children for a family?
Personally I think there's nothing like an ideal number of children for a family.

A lot of things determine how many children a couple should have, and its entirely up to the husband and wife to decide how many children they want and work towards it.
Factors like income and personal desires are major deciding factors to how many children one wants to have.

Taking good care of our children is a major goal and as such we should have the number of children we can comfortably take care of, financially, emotionally and even physically.
Where one doesn't want to keep house helps, cooking, bathing the children, assisting with home work, running errands and other relevant duties should be put into consideration.
Feeding, clothes, school fees and other extras like vacations, should also be considered in the financial angle of child upbringing.

Before I got married I wanted to have 5 children. After I got married and had my 1st child, I reduced the number to 4 children. By the time i had my 2nd child I had further reduced it to 3 children and was considering having just the 2 God had already given me. I just made a last minute decision to have one more because if I left it any longer, I'm sure I would have stopped at just 2. All these while my husband would have been OK with just 1, he said as much when we met. For him, 2 was stretching it. And here we are with 3 wonderful children.

1st hand, I know its not easy, financially, emotionally, spiritually and all round but having children and the number to have is a decision to be planned by the parents, considering the above factors.

Some have more children than they planned because they have all children the same gender and are looking for a male or a female child.

But otherwise we all have an idea of how many children we want from the word go.