Now that I know to search I’m seeing some options on reliable supplement sites! B1 was really excited to get a gummy today, hope he feels better tomorrow
4 Likes
Hey Everyone!!
I posed a long time ago about why people choose to have kids. You all provided the best responses that brought me to tears.
I am here with another request - I know this is a sensitive topic so please assume this is coming from a place of love and curiosity. There is no judgement towards those who did not have multiple kids either.
If you have more than one kid - how did you make that decision? I am feeling a sense of dread about having a second kiddo and like it will ruin everything. It feels like having two kids in diapers will be really hard. It sounds exhausting wrangling two kiddos instead of just one. Dealing with sibling fighting, relationship stress from a more complicated life, more strained finances, and all of the potential negative outcomes are where my mind is taking me right now.
Do you have good stories of how having multiple kids has enriched your life personally? Selfish reasons that having two or more kids was a good thing for your family?
12 Likes
I think having a second is the best thing I’ve ever done in parenting my first. Caveats that she’s only 4 months, and we did a big gap and for MY KID this would not have been true with a smaller gap. Given the spacing we have, almost 4 years, my oldest has absolutely stepped up and bloomed as an older sister. It is so meaningful for her. It’s been wonderful seeing her nurture and teach and adore her baby sister. When we told her we were pregnant, I expected it to be pretty abstract for her, but from the get-go, she wanted to know constantly about babies, and what her sister was doing inside me at the time, and everything. She’s been obsessed and in love with her sister since the moment she realized she existed.
I very nearly gave up on having a second. With how hard it was for me to get and stay pregnant, and my missed miscarriage and everything I wondered if it was worth it, and my first is a handful, and has always been very high attention needs and everything.
More later, because ironically, my second is having a hard time this second and crying at me so I can’t talk much for my message. But I’ll ponder more how to phrase things and loop back later.
13 Likes
For me, having a second has been really healing and wonderful. My delivery and PP was so much easier and having the perspective of “this will pass so quickly” has made everything so much easier. (I mean plus an easier baby but you can’t predict that). This time has let me process and relive my oldest in many ways and it’s been really healing and joyful for me. Idk how to explain that more. Psych vibes be good. Super bittersweet knowing this is my last and it’s moving SO fast this time. My guess is most people enjoy (in the, fun enjoyment sort of way) their second+ kids more. It’s less stressful? In spite of being more stressful because more is going on, but you’re in the groove of doing and rolling with the punches so it’s easier somehow. Stuff is a logistical challenge not an existential one, lol.
9 Likes
I enjoyed my first so much more than I expected that I wanted to do it again! I mean, she was not an easy baby but she was amazing and it was so much more fun than I expected.
I did worry that I had exhausted my good luck the second and third times and that something horrible was bound to happen, but it did not. Indeed, my second birth was incredibly easy and the baby was much more laid back and we all really had fun.
The third was honestly not very practical - three kids is a lot of kids these days! And I was 39 so I was pretty tired to start with and heard a lot about the many things that could go wrong, but again it was fine. Her sisters were thrilled.
I dunno. We got married right out of college and waited 7 years to have kids, and I had decided by then that we’d just see where life took us.
5 Likes
We took forever to legally get married but were living together for 11 years before baby. Somehow it’s not easier.
2 Likes
For me having only one kid wasn’t going to be a choice I wanted to make. It was always going to be either 2 or 3 or none. My oldest is a child who feels everything very deeply much like me. She is so caring and fierce all at the same time. Having her and no other child felt like someone was missing.
The younger is just as caring and fierce and they make the best pair. They regularly say that their sister is their best friend. Yesterday on a walk we were just talking and youngest runs after the oldest yelling “I LOVE YOU!” then gives her a full on tackle hug.
That’s a lot of rambling to say that yes 2 are logistically a lot. For us the logistics were worth the memories that my girls have. The logistics are also the big reason we are not having a third. Maybe the logistics are not worth having a second for you. Maybe they are.
6 Likes
I don’t think it made the baby care easier, but I think we had learned to work together and we had done some really hard things as a couple.
My friends who got married and had a baby immediately had a really different experience IMO.
6 Likes
My 4 year old put this on the baby this morning and said “it is little because you are little, and it is a heart because I love you!” She doesn’t really express any love for her dad and I, and not for the dog much, so this alone? Huge for us. And fills my heart in a way I didn’t expect it would feel so Big and Important.
I can’t imagine making the choice to have another when my oldest was super young though, before knowing what they’re like? Personally.
14 Likes
You are not wrong about these things. With the very strong caveat that there is absolutely nothing wrong with only children, we had our second kid pretty much solely because we felt that our oldest would benefit from not being an only. Her personality is extremely introverted, isolated, and attached. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but DH and I both felt like she would benefit from a sibling to mitigate some of it. It has worked very well. For both DH and I it would have been easier to stick to one. For the kids, it is so easy to see the benefits to them. They fight a bit, but they love so much.
I’m happy with two and never wanted more but two is really hard. My advice is not to do it if you feel anything but sure. It’s not double the work imo, it feels like triple, at least while they’re small. I think if you feel any dread, you should at least wait a while.
8 Likes
Only one kid here but we had tried for a second
Pre-kids we nebulously said we wanted probably 2, maybe 3, but we’d wait till we had at least one to see how we felt about it. Then infertility happened and we almost had zero (if the last round of IVF hadn’t worked I would have accepted being childless because I mentally couldn’t handle any more fertility treatments). Then it worked! When Kiddo was around a year old the idea of a second was kinda crazy but also we weren’t getting younger, I think around a year and a half-ish we started the process to do a second by IVF using fertilized embryos leftover from before that had been frozen. I’m an only child so the sibling dynamic was going to be a challenge but I was willing to give it a try. Also at this point we knew Kiddo had an unspecified disability (that manifested in ways that we knew about, we just didn’t have an official diagnosis yet) but we had the beginnings of knowing how we were going to have to cope with it and that it wasn’t genetic.
That ended up not taking but at that point it was like “Oh okay” rather than a life changing thing. I mean, either way it’s obviously life changing but one kid versus two is a different experience than one kid versus none. Plus I spent all of Kiddo’s infancy acknowledging in the moment that I might never get the chance to do this again, on top of having imposture syndrome for the entire time I was pregnant with Kiddo.
7 Likes
This could be a total fluke but with the addition of second kid, I felt like it was a bit easier to share the load/divide labor with my husband compared to just one. It is a lot more work but we function better as a team with the additional kid? I’m not sure why that is. Maybe because the labor for infants tends to be pretty unequally loaded on the nursing parent. Maybe just second go round things. I was pleasantly surprised by this aspect.
6 Likes
Before having my first, I thought I could only have one because I would be 35 when he was born and the math only almost worked out to be able to raise him. He was an incredibly difficult baby and the first time he slept for 5h straight I was ready for more. Emotionally I want 10.
Practically, having a second was really hard for is and for our first. Our eldest would thrive being the baby of the family, or having a bigger gap, but he’s managing and none of us could have known the ways it is hard. My second is an easier baby in many ways. Or was an easier baby, is shaping up to be a gleefully difficult toddler. My kids unequivocally love each other, but our finances health and time are stretched to the max. I spent half this month arguing that we could find some way to have a third, and then got sick and am going to discuss permanent birth control with my doctor.
To have a third, I would want a much bigger gap which would mean trying for a baby at 50. And then we’d have the time, but will my health be stronger or starting to fail? Will my then 54yo husband be running on energy? Would my older kids have other needs?
I strongly believe that having kids should be a hell yes if life gives you the option to choose. I also know people have different health or fertility situations that might push the decision earlier and make you wonder if you’ll regret a decision.
13 Likes
Being a mother was so, so easy for me. Literally everyone we saw in the months after D1 was born talked about how naturally we took to parenting and how it seemed like she was our 6th and not our first. It was so wonderful and she was 3 months old when I looked at DH and said I definitely wanted to have another baby. We decided not to use birth control and just use nfp once my cycle came back since we were totally open to having another child. We also thought we would start really trying when she turned 12 months old. We wanted the close together because I wanted to only do diapers once. I couldn’t imagine being done and then starting again. I wanted to do the baby phase all at once and then move on with our lives.
We were not prepared for me to get pregnant my first cycle, so no initial period, and no way to do nfp. That’s why they are only 15 months apart.
9 Likes
It was an easy decision for us to have a second, but when was a little harder. We were finally ready when he was 2yo, having gotten through a lot of rough early parenting and my health finally being good enough. He was so little before then! He liked babies as well (enjoyed playing with the littler ones at daycare) so we felt pretty comfortable he’d enjoy being a big brother too.
I was pregnant when he was 2.5 (miscarried) and when he was 3.5. It was much easier being pregnant with a 3.5yo than a 2.5yo, and we ended up with a 4 year age gap. I had intended to have babies close together so there were some Big Feels but I suspect it was much, much easier on us that Duckling was old enough to be kind to baby even when he wanted parents attention.
My pregnancies are incredibly rough, so if you have a standard pregnancy you’d hit the rough stage after they were born rather than before like we did. There was SO much less to learn the second time, we knew what we were like as parents. Plenty of love for baby from her dad and brother, which was good because due to the trauma of my pregnancy and major healing from labour, it took me months and months to bond to her emotionally.
Seconds aren’t always gonna be easier in every way. I was told labour would be smoother and it was not! (But it was faster, which was not useful in my case). But ours was going to be worth it from the start and was a big HELL YES! so that made all the things something we could get through.
5 Likes
I am 8.5 months into having two kids. Here’s what my dining room floor looked like all afternoon. The baby was eating pumpkin seeds and raspberries and popcorn off the floor.
Older kid spent all of yesterday singing younger one’s name in a made-up song and bringing him presents, and all of today shoving him when he got too close. There are twice as many delightful and zany sayings, actions, expressions. My heart is twice as full.
We were both on team “first one, then we’ll see.” When Spore got to be about 20 months and could walk without falling down all the time that evolved to “we can’t say we really want 2 young kids at the same time, but we’d like to give our kid the feeling of someone always having your back that we share with our siblings.”
Mine are 2.5 years apart and I could not have handled having them closer. We potty trained a couple months before my due date and luckily it worked. I would have waited even longer for #2 except I am 40, and I was also ready to have the physical toil of childbearing behind me. We have lots of cards stacked in our favor (amazing grandparents in the neighborhood, hitting FI right before kid #1, fantastic local friend group, wonderful childcare) and without that I’m not sure I would have been enthusiastic about a second – I would be much more stressed all the time and have zero time to myself, and I don’t want to be a chronically stressed parent to one kid let alone two.
One friend with two kids told me “one kid is a kid, two is an organization”. You’re not going from 1 kid to 2 – you’re going from 1 surplus adult to 0 surplus adults. With 1 kid we did a fair amount of trading off. With 2 young ones, I don’t feel like “my life is ruined” but it’s much more reorganized around family activities first, personal time secondary. I’ve dialed back to 80% time at work just to have a little buffer.
When it all works we can juggle 2 careers, a few community things, a much-reduced version of sports, and time for our relationship and friends. Even so, it feels like any hiccup (like my husband’s concussion this fall) sends the whole Jenga tower crashing down.
My mom is away this month and my dad tested positive for covid right when she left, so we don’t have our usual grandparent support. The seams definitely show, especially in my relationship with my spouse.
You don’t have to decide now. In fact, if you “feel a sense of dread” I would suggest putting a pin in it for a certain period of time, just so it’s not hanging over your head. My husband and I are both 5-6 years apart from our siblings, and while we weren’t besties growing up, we are all really close as adults. Is there a reason you are considering this now if the downsides feel so vivid right now?
9 Likes
The decision to have one was to have more than one, for us. My kids’ dad is an only child and I got a brother at almost ten years old, so I was kind of an only myself, and we both hated it. So it was never an option. BUT, I didn’t feel a desire for another baby until the first one was around 18 months. I don’t mean I felt ready for it then, just that I had the feeling of really wanting the other that was nebulously planned around that time. My two are three years apart, which I think was a great age gap. Big sister has always been a really good, really loving older sibling. And she helped with her little brother’s diapers and potty training!
Selfishly, ummmm, I feel like I have more opportunities for grandchildren than I would with just one kid? A bigger family in general, which I always want. More people to help support me and care for me in my old age? I’m not saying I see my kids as insurance policies, but… well, I’m glad there are two instead of one. Because who knows what life will bring (she writes from her hospital room with a broken leg while dealing with a divorce).
Multiple kids is also just more opportunities for growth as a person. You parent one child and think you’ve got it, and then you have another child who shows you new skills you need to learn. You learn about one kid’s interests and explore that in order to support them, and well, double that because the other kid teaches you other things. My relationship of mother and child is different with each of my kids because they are different people. I feel more fleshed out for having two. Just more of the full human spectrum of life experiences, you know?
Selfishly as a parent, I’ve found it mostly easier to deal with life as a working parent because my kids had each other to play with. Of course there is more work and more cost, etc. But siblings playing together is special and wonderful and good goddamn break! And not selfishly, I’m so, so glad my kids have each other. Even now, as teens, they don’t do a lot of “playing” together but they are close and they do support each other. And I think that’s going to come into play even more now due to the divorce.
But all of this is just icing on the cake. The real answer is more love is more love. The love quadruples, the laughs quadruple, the experiences and the fun and the ups and the downs, it’s all just more. I like more love.
12 Likes
I kinda felt the same way - that I wanted them to have a “wing man”
6 Likes
I can’t help with your main question because we are I ly having one.
But…I couldn’t even consider the thought of a second until my kid was 2.5 or 3. Now there are some fleeting moments that I wish we could have a second.
My sister and I were two years apart and we were not near buds. We’re very different people. We have a good relationship now but she’s not the first person I call and I’m not the first person she’s calls when we need to talk to someone. I think we would have gotten along better as kids with a larger age gap because the expectation of being good friends would have been lower.
So I think it’s totally fair to wait another year or two and see how you feel!
6 Likes
How much is it ok to let baby just kind of chill in her crib by herself as long as shes happily burbling and playing with her hands and practicing rolling around? Because my executive function today is like, 0.
8 Likes