Going From Two Kids To Three Nearly Defeated Me. There, I Said It.
Mom With Me Vol. 1
I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for a good twelve weeks now. Is it relevant anymore, I ask myself? Has the window to begin my sweeping weekly mothering series shut before I even had a chance to stick my head out of it and say hello?
But then, naps don’t line up. Or if they do, I decide it’s more important to my sanity to clean up the lunch detritus and chug a hot cup of tea before I can be mentally ready to sit down and pour out my thoughts on just how freaking hard it has been on me and on our family to go from two children to three. (And let’s not even consider writing during the one-hour window of glorious, wonderful me time I get between the kids’ bedtime and my own bedtime. Yes, I go to bed early. But you would too, if your four-month-old was still getting up twice a night.)
But here I am, so I’ll get right into it, because the baby is bound to wake up at any minute.
When I became pregnant with my third child, I wondered what the transition would look like. General online advice was mixed. Some moms said things along the lines of, “So easy! They just fit right in with the rest of the family!” While others said, “Hardest transition ever.” Often the crazy-face emoji was involved. And then, of course, there were the truly unhelpful articles from other moms that said something along the lines of, “Life is full! Full of love! Full of joy!”
Me? I assumed I gestated easy babies. After all, my first two kids weren’t too big of a deal. Sure, the transition from zero kids to one was difficult, but that’s because it’s a huge freaking lifestyle change to go from being able to stay up late and lay down for a nap whenever I wanted, to having an infant rely on me for 100% of his needs. And it wasn’t all peaches and roses. My son, now four, was finicky with his sleep, which at the time I thought was the end of the world. (Also, like, he almost died when he was born and so I spent the first two years of his life worried about the residual effects of that. But that’s another article for another day.) And he had gnarly eczema.
But once I got him sleep trained and “aggressively moisturized,” it was smooth sailing. From infancy, I could put him down and leave the room without shrieks of protest. He was happy chatting with himself in the car seat mirror on long drives. We moved across the country when he was six months old, and the worst thing that happened was that my husband accidentally left him in the car (FOR LIKE TWO MINUTES, DON’T WORRY) because he was so quiet in his seat.
My daughter, now two, was even easier, believe it or not. Like, sleeping through the night at one month easy. Rolled at six weeks easy. The happiest, sweetest baby ever. Yes, the transition to siblinghood was a little difficult for her brother, but in my memory he got over it fairly quickly, and we spent the rest of that year potty training him.
As it turns out, reader, you can get a not-so-easy baby even after, or perhaps especially after, two easy ones.
So, my official stance is: hardest transition ever. Crazy-face emoji. Wine emoji. And lest I leave you with any sort of ambiguity as to the why of it, let me lay it all out:
1. Her personality. Baby L is a lot more needy than my non-needy previous two children. Who, don’t get me wrong, were so non-needy that I was actually concerned about them enough to search Google for answers. What had I done? Had I ruined them by neglecting them? Leaving them to play alone? As it turns out, no. Some babies are just a lot more vocal than others. L is said baby.
2. Her sleep. I thought I’d somehow done something right with my older daughter’s sleep, given that she was able to sleep three-hour stretches and go right back to sleep from the start of her life. (My oldest had been, in my mind, “ruined” by his stint in the NICU and his Grammy’s constant rocking.) I am discovering, though, that some kids are just born sleepers, and some aren’t. L is, of course, one of the non-sleepers.
3. My middle child. As I said before, I don’t remember the transition to siblinghood being super difficult for my son, but he’s an independent little dude. He had his growing pains, but it was nothing like the struggle my daughter has gone through the past three months. She’s a complete mama’s girl, and has had a heck of a time accepting the fact that she’s not the baby of the family anymore.
4. My husband being gone for eight weeks. Which, to be fair, we knew was going to happen. He’s in the military, and that’s how his training lined up. We were lucky enough to have had near-constant help from the time of L’s birth until he left just after she reached the six-week mark, and I’m not actually sure if that made the transition easier or harder for me. In any case, it is what it is: solo-parenting three children four and under is a disaster. 0/10, would not recommend
5. She hates the car and just…shopping in general. Which is stressful, when she has to be loaded into the car twice a day for her brother’s school pickup and dropoff. Or to go to her sister’s speech therapy appointments. Or to come with me for a quick trip to the grocery store literally across the street to pick up a dinner ingredient I forgot to buy. And she doesn’t just have a regular cry, either. No: she has an I’m-being-physically-tortured cry.
6. She has an I’m-being-physically-tortured cry. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that, except, yes. I will. She literally set off the glass break sirens in our house a few weeks ago during a middle-of-the-night wakeup.
All this is to say that yes. Life is full. Full of diapers, and of multiple children yelling at me to take care of their EXACT needs at that EXACT moment. Full of a lot more screen time than I ever intended, even if it is just Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Mary Poppins, and YouTube videos of Norwegian train rides. Full of the detritus of preschool and toddlerhood, and full of constant snack requests and meal refusals. So full that there’s barely any time to think, let alone sleep.
But here’s the thing. Do I wish we hadn’t made the decision to have a third? No, not at all. In spite of how difficult it’s been adding Baby L to the mix, it’s still wonderful having her around. Now that she’s getting older and growing out of her newborn neediness, her personality is beginning to develop — she is truly sweet and even jolly. Also, I may be slightly obsessed with how she always smells like a combination of Dreft and curdled milk. And of course, I see how fond my older two are of each other and it makes me so excited to watch them grow to love their youngest sister as well.
And there is hope. Now that Baby L is nearing five months (ahem), things are improving. She’s a lot happier now that she’s officially out of the Fourth Trimester, and she’s generally able to be strategically neglected while I attend to the older kids. She’s found her thumb, and so if I forget to pack along the one pacifier that she will actually take, she’s still able to soothe herself to sleep if we find ourself past nap time at the park. Also, I’m not solo-parenting anymore — Dad’s been back for a month. Having a partner in parenting — even just a body to distract the older children while I get the youngest down to bed — is something I will never take for granted again.
So the TL;DR here is that it’s difficult, but I would never in a million billion years give up Baby L just to return to our slightly simpler life. And so, to you newly-pregnant person who has just panic-Googled “transition to three kids easy or hard,” it’s both. All of the above. You’ll survive, you’ll thrive, and there will be a whole lot of love surrounding you. And chaos, too. Always chaos.
