And this is on top of having so much help around the house, especially my first 3 weeks. My MIL and her husband stayed with us for 3 weeks to help out. I felt like we were at a restaurant every night because they cooked fresh meals.
My husband and I always agreed that 2 is max for us if we were lucky enough to have kids. More on selfish reasons though… I had an easy pregnancy compared to a lot, but I gotta say, acid reflux… I hated it. But definitely, everything you said, is exactly why my husband and I want to max out at 2.
Thanks for the good read! Great article with many things to consider. However, your points on travel expenses and extracurriculars really make me second guess having another child. I want to give our current family members the world. I feel selfish for still wanting another. I really needed this! Thank you. Thank you! This is a really well written article. We have a 3 yr old boy and 1 yr old girl. I think adoption might be in our future. While these are great insights, they all seem to pale when I think of kids with no one to love them.
The reasons not having a third are selfish too. I want attend the courses, I want to travel, I want my body back, I want an easy life, I want to pay for them…. Since when can moms not have wants and wishes of their own? I work my butt off every waking hour making sure my 2 are happy and well taken care of.
I wanted three and my third child is a total handful and much more challenging than my older two. We needed him. Ultimately, I say follow your gut and your heart. Good luck to the moms that are on the fence! This is wonderful, yes to all of those thoughtful considerations! Once I was pregnant with my second I started to think maybe I might be finished already!
We live away from both our families and it was pretty tough not having help close at hand to get a bit of rest here and there. Happy Family Planning everyone! I strongly feel every couple has to determine what works best for them. My husband and I have 5 children. Our oldest is 20 and our youngest is 5.
I am very close to all my children and I spend one on one time with them. We still take a yearly vacation to a different city trying to show them everything we can. They have all been in a sport s they chose and we have encouraged them to take piano, guitar, gymnastics.
I make sure to attend everything I possibly can and because I have a flexible work schedule I very rarely have to miss anything. My husband and I have been fortunate enough to make a very good income through our own hard work and have taught this to our children. I guess my point is that you can give everything you mentioned to all your children if you choose to have a large family too. Three kids is too expensive, too much mess and tOO much stress. Not to mention that the older two kids are missing out on activities and outings.
If I could go back in time to our happy family of four I totally would. With all thEse decisions firmly set in place, if you accidentally became pregnant wiTh a third, would you still feel the same way?
Asking for a friend. The lOss of a major life role in addition to a loved one is very hard and having more Children, siblings, eTc. I love you for written this I am very happy with my 2 girls and feel super happy content and complete but I do get confused sometimes when I listen to people. I Know This was written a while back so i hope this message finds you. My Question to yoU is if you can speak to being a siBling of a trio.
Did you feel one person was alWays left out as a child? Was there ganging up on each other? If 3 is going to compromise relationships between them i rather Have 2 but i also dont want to regret not having a third. I love the point about not needing a Boy the most. A kid is a kid regardless of gender, he or she are their own person. What you perceive as Too much information or too much questionIng is often well meaning and sometimes just mean. Thank you for writing this article.
Thank your for Laying this out. I have a 1 year old and a 4 year old, both boys and I have always dreamed of a daughter, I also love the new baby moments because they are so special and amazing, but you are totally right, I will always love that new baby time and I dont think that will change with one more.
Truth is, we are really at capacity with two. My husband and I love our freedom and careers and want to have fun with our kids. Sometimes it is just hard to let go of the idea of not adding another little person into our family. Anyways, thanks for posting this, you have a lot of good points.
Thank you for writing about this. I always thought i wanted three, but now that i am at a difficult second pregnancy, I have been thinking more and more about only having two children, and what the benefits of that would be. The gender mix of siblings can be a factor too. Siblings, then, can be a mixed bag. Each kid is another person that gets to be alive and will be very likely to be glad to be alive. Sometimes, populations deviate from this replacement-level rate in a way that stresses out demographers.
In many countries in central and West Africa—such as Senegal, Mali, and Cameroon—the desired family size for many young women is four to six children, says John Casterline, a demographer at Ohio State who has conducted research in the region.
This number has stayed relatively high even as people have attained higher average levels of education—a shift that, in Asia and Latin America, for instance, is usually accompanied by a shrinking of the hoped-for size of families.
One guess, Casterline says, has to do with how family is conceptualized. He said that child mortality rates in many parts of the world have declined a lot in the past few decades. Some hard-to-quantify preferences also seem to be playing a role. Casterline remembered conducting surveys in Egypt a decade or so ago, and listening to Egyptians discuss the merits of having three children versus two.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the typical married woman had seven to 10 children, but by the beginning of the 20th, that number had fallen to three. And some aspects of society are designed to work best for families of a certain size—a standard car in America, for instance, comfortably fits four people.
After accounting for what a given society is like, and what a given household within that society is like, one could very well determine the optimal number of children to have.
But those considerations are less compelling and more clinical when compared with the joy people have when they see a child hold his baby sister for the first time; attend an enormous, rowdy family reunion; or plan a blissful getaway without having to worry about who will watch the children. Seriously, all hail to all moms out there—whether you have one, three, five or ten.
No matter the number, it takes figuring out. This article was originally published online in November Parenting 7 things I've learned about having three kids Thinking about taking the leap and having a third child? Photo: Rachel Cameron. A third kid can actually make life LESS chaotic The arrival of our third son made my older boys realize that the world exists outside their own needs. As hard as it is, you figure it out Some people ask how we do it with three.
Joseph Communications uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other purposes. Learn more or change your cookie preferences. By continuing to use our service, you agree to our use of cookies. We use cookies why? Thankfully, Sam has a 6-seater van for work and all of the seats in the back can be used with an ISO-fix base.
Sam is a gas engineer so the back of his van is separate and has all of his tools and stuff, but he can take everything out for weekends away which is very handy as it means we can take bikes and double buggies and loads of luggage and we could quite literally take the kitchen sink.
I might still do this in the future but our setup is working fine at the moment. Update: I have a Multimac!! You can read my Multimac car seat review here. Not really. Yes and no. I actually wanted at least 2 years between the first 2 kids but we got lucky and it happened straight away. I was conscious that if we had a massive gap between the boys and a third child, the boys would always seem so close the third would be like an only child. No, not really. When we go away we very rarely stay in hotels and prefer private villas.
The only other option in a hotel is to have connecting family rooms which is a nice option but twice the price so it usually works out better value to have a villa.
We were nervous about the flight but, like I said earlier, George is now at a much easier phase and he can entertain himself during a 4-hour flight.
We found holidays and life in general! Our lives changed a lot when we had a second. So when we had Alba we were definitely already living a very child-friendly lifestyle that allowed a baby to slot into very easily. To be honest, I do really well with sleep!
This definitely applies to sleep! I really do. Middle Child Syndrome is a thing! We have to be really careful not to treat Joseph in the same way we treat George.
Sometimes we get frustrated with Joseph for not listening or behaving as well as his older brother. And at the same time, we also need to be careful not to treat George like a 3 year old! So there you have it. What life is like having 3 kids. Our first three months with our baby girl. How to continue travel blogging after having kids. Monica Hi, I'm Monica! This is my family lifestyle blog where I share posts about motherhood and microadventures.
Haha, I can imagine! I had 3, even closer in age than yours, 2 girls and then a boy, and can resonate with everything you said. They were close growing up and even now hunt in a pack.
I used to tell my middle one she was the filling in the sandwich, the interesting one. Very interesting post. I have 4year old son, and Now I came to know, I am pregnant with twins. Can you please give some idea, how difficult it is to handle twin at same time. We were expecting only 2 kids but now we will have 3 kids. They entertain each other and play together. I have 2 kids. A girl 2,5 and a boy 1. After I gave birth to my daughter, I started thinking about second one right away, and after my son was born at first I was dreaming about 1 or 2 more, but now after a year has past, I am starting to have doubts.
The main doubt is that if I have one more baby I will be providing for him at the expense if my other two kids. Education or travel. Or time I can spend with them. Not sure how you can really make this decision in contemporary world where you have to pay insane money for a baby sitter.
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