Hi there debden,    My  husband and I have 3 small children under the age of 5 and over the past 18mths , we have purchased 2 investment properties, and now we are about to purchase our 3rd.  We came from living on the gold coast for 10 years, existing on the rental merry-go-round, living week to week and watching so many people around us investing and making money from property.  The majority of properties we lived in on the Gold Coast we rented privately and we actually became friends with several of our landlords.  They would share with us their ideas and success stories regarding property.  This was the beginning of our education as far as property investing was concerned – we were inspired by these people as we watched and learned.   
Ultimately, we just wanted into the market, however, the more we saved for a deposit, the quicker it seemed that the market on the Gold Coast would get more expensive and our deposit was not enough!  It was so frustrating!  The banks/lenders did not look favorably on us either, we had no assests, no equity, more debt than savings, self-employed and we had 1 child with another on the way!  We had to come up with an idea to make bulk cash fast.
So, my husband, a Ship Wright by trade, bought a haul of a boat,  from the company he contracted for at cost price and he did all the work on it in his spare time, we pretty much spent any spare cash we had on completing the boat..  This boat  was our ticket to our first house. We sold the boat  for $25K, which gave us a cash profit of $18K.  This gave us our break into the property market.   During this time, we moved from the Gold Coast to Yeppoon, a bit of a sea change but one we felt was necessary, it also took us back to be around both our parents with our growing brood of children.
Funny enough, when we got to Yeppoon, the property market was red hot and we felt like the BOOM was following us.  Again, we just couldn't afford to buy as first time home owners with children into this market either.  However, within 3 months we decided to sacrifice living at the beach and moved to Rockhampton, where we bought our first house for $144K, in a blue chip area.  It was the smallest and ugliest house in a beautiful street.  The house across the road was on the market for $650K.  We just knew that Rocky was going to take off, especially seeing as the resource boom was happening .  Within 6 months it did and we made a gain of $150K, so we bought another home in the same suburb using the equity from the first house and did not use a cent of our own money.  Both these homes have more than doubled in value now and both are continually tenanted with high rents providing positive cash flow.  We are now looking for our next deal and we are excited about that fact.
For us, we feel that we have made alot of sacrifices to get to this point.  We now live in a remote mining community, a far cry from the Gold Coast and surf that my husband longs for.  Here, we are provided with a free house, so this gives us more cash flow to continue to build our property portfolio.
We have had so many people doubt us, and said the risks weren't worth it……however we are happy with our decisions thus far, we have made mistakes yet learnt alot, and well, it has all be worth it!