One of our contributors wrote an article recently about her experience going from one child to two, and it inspired me to share my experience going from three to four kids!
Yes, I have four kids, and yes we often get called
crazy for having a big family in “this day and age”.
We were blessed with twins as our first, so I never had the traditional one-child experience. Raising two babies at once was all I ever knew. So when we had our third it was like a dream. One baby to feed, to cuddle, to change, to put to bed.
Three kids for me seemed so easy, so why not go for number four!
All the moms at the park would tell me, after you have three, it’s easy. I am going to be honest it was not a walk in the park for me.
When I brought her home, life got a lot more chaotic. The twins were older, with busier schedules, with hobbies and sports. Our three-year-old, although he didn’t need me anymore, still very much needed me. The baby was exclusively breastfed and decided to be our only child that still refuses to take a bottle, so she has fully relied on me for nutrition.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change my life one bit. I am so beyond blessed and overwhelmingly in love with motherhood.
But I have found myself surprised at how difficult it was to transition from three to four. Zero to two kids was a pure blessing. Two to three was blissful. Three to four has just been – dare I say it – challenging. It has been joyful, beautiful, and amazing, but also messy. I know we are in the thick of it but some days are just hard.
In order to make those days less difficult and mundane, there are things that I have learned to accept and some things that I have had to learn to let go of.
- Running late is my new norm.
- Baskets of never-ending laundry will always be stacked at the end of my bed.
- Dishes will always fill my sink after just one meal.
- Snacks, oh yeah, there will never be enough of those in the pantry.
- Lastly, our children have inherited their mother’s loudness gene therefore our house will always be the loudest on the street.
- Our house is also filled to the brim with love.
Here I am exposing my reality out loud to a bunch of strangers just hoping that I am not the only one in the trenches of raising tiny humans. Sometimes it feels good to tell the world that we are having a hard time. It is a great way to remind us that someone else out there feels exactly the same way we do, whether it looks like it or not on Instagram.
