Well, the news is out! Finally! We were so excited to announce to the world that we are expecting a little bundle in July!
I think I have three main reactions right now. Excitement. Nerves. and Relief.
Obviously the excitement and joy are overwhelming, Nerves are because I'm going to be having a 3rd child and Relief because Georgia keeps asking for a baby sister or brother.
Obviously the excitement and joy are overwhelming, Nerves are because I'm going to be having a 3rd child and Relief because Georgia keeps asking for a baby sister or brother.
I used to have these thoughts in my head of having 4 or 5 kids. But with having had 2 kids already that idea has changed. Ryan and I spent a little bit of time here and there chatting about the why’s and why not’s of us actually committing to having another baby.
Should we reproduce???
Why Reproduce???
The reasons to do it weren't as compelling as with my previous two kids. It's
not like we needed to make another kid to keep the first one company - that box
was checked. And we already had the two major genders covered. But aside from
just generally wanting a bigger family, I had this nagging sense that someone
was missing. I'd look at our dining table and think, if we don't have another
kid, there's always going to be an empty place at our table that someone should
be sitting in. (Some would say we should have just gotten a smaller table.) This
was not a rational feeling, and I hate having irrational feelings. It seemed
like a stupid thing to consider, anyway, what if we did have a third kid, and
those feelings bubbled up again? It wasn't like I was prepared to keep
scratching that itch indefinitely, so why not stop now?
Middle Child Syndrome
Then there was the issue of middle child syndrome. Initially, I didn't know what
this term meant, but it didn't sound good. There's just something about the word
"syndrome" that seems sinister; you can put it next to another word that's
perfectly innocuous and it will instantly start sounding bad. Take "eyebrow,"
for example. Eyebrows are great, everyone has them, yet if you say "eyebrow
syndrome " suddenly things look pretty grim.
Being me, I ended up Googling "middle child syndrome" and reading roughly 50
different definitions of it (some of which conflicted with others). Based on
what I read I wasn't convinced that it was a real problem, it seemed to me that
there were so many other ways in which we'd probably screw up the kids that a
little thing like birth order would be hardly noticeable.
You'd think that a person who had already decided to have two kids (without
angst, without doubts) would have no trouble deciding whether to have a third -
but, um, no. For all the reasons I mentioned above, the decision was much harder
the third time around, and Ryan and I continued to waffle. We'd decide that
we definitely, absolutely wanted another child, and then we'd be up all night
with two kids crying and being sick on us and think, there's no way we're signing up for this
again. Only complete idiots would have three kids on purpose.
One reason for having three kids is so that you can stop talking about having
three kids.
So with that we decided to have a 3rd child, We didn't want to spend our lives wondering....