And Baby Makes 4...probably not...but maybe?! (Guest Post)

By MommaBear

I just found out my sister-in-law is pregnant. This will be her 4th babe. Her other babes are 8,6, & 5. She is also 39. I'm so happy for her! But I'm also jealous. How in the hell could I be jealous?! Okay I secretly desire 4 babes but I just don't think that would be a good idea. My husband is totally content with 3 babes and feels overwhelmed by 3 most days of the week. Our finances are strained, we've run out of room in our house, Jason and I are on edge a lot of the time because of the stress of raising 3 babes. I know part of this is because our babes are 3, 2, & 8 months. Our kids are incredibly close in age and that is probably the hardest part. I also have some sort of muscular issues and I'm in pain a lot of the time (sometimes minor sometimes major). My husband also has had some chronic back problems and reoccuring wrist and elbow problems. We're relatively young yet we feel like we're falling apart! I know the pain and oh yeah lack of sleep (thanks to our 3 year old who keeps waking us up as he's crawling into our bed multiple times in the night!) add to the stress of little kids. But regardless I have this nagging desire to have 4babes. I suffer horribly from PPD and our whole household gets flipped upside down it seems when another baby is brought home. What the hell am I thinking?! We're afraid it would be too much on the other babes to go through another transition of adjusting to a new baby again. We also know how grumpy and mean we can be when we weeks and weeks of no sleep. The thought of being pregnant again does scare me because I've had some physical issues that seem to flare up when I'm pregnant,leaving me in pain most days. If we did have a 4th babe when would we?Would we wait until Joseph, our 8 month old, is 2, 3, or 4? I can't have another babe as close in age as the other three, it's too difficult! But if I wait 3.5 years it seems too long to me. I want to finish my degree and work some. If I wait 3.5 years to have another babe I'll be around 35, which isn't old but it will realistically push my degree back another 5 years. I hope to work on my degree when my youngest child starts Kindergarten. Besides the obvious reasons not to have a baby, my husband says, "NO!" And my kids lives finally settling down and having a "normal" day to day after having a pregnant, tired,and a grumpy mom for 9 months, a colicky baby brother for 7 months and then being thrown into living in a house that's on the market and then moving into a new house-pure chaos...I still desire another baby. I wish the yearnings for another will end. It makes the realty of not having another painful even amidst the chaos and other dreams I have for myself and my family. Ugg. Sometimes I hate living in the grey area of life. I want life to present me with black and white, yes or no decisions where I don't regret my choices. Ugg.

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Well, I have to comment here. Four kids is hard, yes, but not really so much harder than three. In fact, as far as difficulty goes, one is a breeze, two is mildly abrasive, three is complete chaos, and all subsequent children are just a continuation of said chaos.

MommaBear blogs at Anxious Monkey, and she's seriously superwoman. Check it out - she has three babies ages three and under. Do you get that? Three babies. The oldest is three. Super woman for sure. I sneakily read her blog every day. (See that Michigan IP on your stat log? That's me. Sneaky sneaky.) You'll like her blog, go see. Or else.