Six weeks after giving birth and I still have a hard time believing I’m a mom of two kids. Kids. Kid, plural. Meaning, more than one kid.
As I look back on my Baby #2 musings, I had a lot of fears going in. Now that G is here, I can say that some of those fears still exist but only faintly. One fear I was able to instantly debunk was not feeling like I could love more than one kid. Before G, Bub was my everything. As soon as they placed her in my arms, my heart doubled. The love is different but equally distributed.
Bub and G are similar and different in many ways, what with being siblings and all. For one, G loves to be out of the house. She wants to see the world. Bub, being a pandemic baby, is more of a homebody. While we spent the first 18 months of Bub’s life holed up at home, Steve has already taken G on daily strolls around the neighborhood, to restaurants, to backyard barbecues, and to Grandma’s on the regular.
True to her behavior in the womb, G loves to move around. While Bub as a baby would happily nestle and sleep on my chest all day, G likes to change positions often and stretch out. She wants to be bounced and walked around. Her eyes flutter at her surroundings. Her lips turn into an “oh” as if to say “ohhhh, look at that”.
Born a pound and a half more than her brother, G doesn’t guzzle milk like he did. He was tiny and hungry all the time. She tends to graze and has been dubbed a “lazy nurser” by the lactation consultant for nursing a little bit before falling asleep and needing to be woken up to continue feeding.
Who knows what these observations mean. Perhaps nothing when it comes to their ultimate personalities. It’s been fun to comment and observe these two little humans we’ve been gifted with, no less.
Friends, family, and strangers have asked if we’re having more kids. If they had asked me the day she was born, I would have told them I might go for one more. But once the endorphins subsided and the exhaustion settled in, I decided that two was enough. I don’t want to pregnant again (I was so physically uncomfortable leading up to her delivery). While I’ll miss having a newborn, I want my life back. Well, at least more of my life back. I will never truly have my life back. Some part of my brain will always be thinking of my children. Taking care of a newborn is a 24/7, round-the-clock, always-on job. Holidays and sick days be damned. In a year, it’ll be nice to have more hours of the day to focus on myself again. In a few years, it’ll be easier for us to take a three-year old and a six-year old on trips. Having a third kid would mean restarting the clock on doing more fun things as a family. Not that we can’t have fun with a baby, it’s just that our adventures right now are more…scaled back.
I’m officially done having kids. That short chapter of my life is resolutely over. It makes me feel old somehow. As soon as G was born, I felt the clock ticking. Blink and she’ll be walking. Turn around and she’ll be in middle school. Wake up and she’ll be in college. Cherish every moment, I tell myself, because it’s all so temporary.
