Three

Yesterday three different people talked to me about having three kids. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. As soon as Isaac was born, nearly everyone started asking when we were going to have another kid. In that case, though, I think people were just making conversation. In this case, all of the people who brought up the three-kid topic actually have three children (or more) themselves. I think they consider themselves ambassadors for the cause. None explicitly tried to convince me to have a third, but I felt like that was the subtext.

The first person was the mother of a boy in Isaac's group at school. She boasted of how short and easy her labor had been with her third child. I wasn't impressed when she told me she only had to push two times when delivering her third child, because my experience wasn't that different with either of my kids. But I pricked up my ears when she said her contractions had been like "half an hour of bad period cramps." Hey, that sounds pretty good, I thought to myself. But then she said, "Of course, I had the epidural." Of course.

The second person was also the mother of a boy in Isaac's group at school (did you know that out here in the affluent suburbs, having more than two kids is a status symbol?). She told me how easy her first two kids were, and how fun it was watching them relate to each other. Like Isaac and Laurel, they are three and a half years apart. Then she had her third 20 months after the second, and she is finding it a real struggle. But she assured me (and perhaps herself) that it is going to improve just as soon as the youngest turns two, and that she is looking forward to many fun years of watching the sibling relationships develop.

The third person was my midwife, who actually has something like seven kids (that's not a status symbol, that's a lifestyle). I had my final postpartum examination with her yesterday, and in the course of asking me about my plans for birth control, she said, "You guys were considering having another baby, right?"

Uh, were we?

I told her that we weren't sure, but that we didn't want to permanently close any doors.

But I have to admit that it wasn't these other people who introduced the topic. That morning I had written it down myself on the list of questions to ask during my appointment: what did the midwife expect that a third birth would be like for me? Would it be even speedier than Laurel's precipitous birth? And if so, how on earth would she make it on time?

She said that third births can be unpredictable, but that in my case she would come to my house just as soon as I showed any signs of going into labor. Then we'd just hang out together and wait for the action to start. She sounded like she was really looking forward to it!

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If you had asked me when Isaac was six weeks old if I wanted to have another baby, I would have answered "Yes, but ..." At that point I knew intellectually that I wanted to have another child, but emotionally I was uncertain. I was exhausted, I was stressed out, and everything seemed so difficult -- doing it again didn't seem like fun. So my brain said yes, but my gut wasn't quite sure.

Laurel is six weeks old and if you asked me the same question now, I would still answer "Yes, but ..." This time, however, my uncertainty is intellectual rather than emotional! We're getting old, we're getting poor, and time and money are finite resources -- but having kids is so much fun! So now my gut says yes, but my brain says no.

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Don't hold your breath. It will be years before we decide what to do.