Adjusting To A Family of Four

*This was written a few weeks ago, but as life goes right now I’m just getting to share it 🙂

We haven’t reached the real trenches of this adjustment quite yet, but I’m learning so many little lessons figuring out how to handle two children it feels worth documenting. 

The biggest lesson of all has been, one person can’t do it all. And thankfully I haven’t had to. I’ve thought a lot about my military friends, mothers of two or more, whose husbands are often off on a TDY or deployed or you name it that pulls them away from their families. I’m not sure how those women have done it. It surely wasn’t without a few tears, probably from their children and themselves as well. The truth is you only have so many hands and so many laps, and only so much patience. 

Our house was wrecked with illness surrounding Eva’s birth. My chest cold still isn’t gone, Aubrey now has an ear infection and bronchitis, and now poor little Eva is starting to cough and sniffle. It would be an understatement to say that I have needed Will more than ever. He has been an absolute workhorse in the past week, in ways I have never seen him do before. We have had to tag team everything from pacifying our kids, to trying to keep the house a livable level of messiness, to making sure we eat somewhere in all the chaos. 

It sounds challenging, and it definitely has been, but in truth it’s also been fun in a way. It’s forced Will and I both to assume bigger roles as parents and as partners. I’ll admit it’s been a sort of love potion seeing my husband really step up to take care of his little girls, and his big one.

My mother heartstrings have been tugged quite a few times with my first little girl feeling so sick and my arms full of newborn squishiness. Nothing sucks quite so much as wanting and needing to comfort your first baby and not being able to.

Aubrey has done pretty well becoming a big sister. She is fascinated by “Baby Eva,” and goes with me every time to check on her during nap time, pulls up her stool to climb up and watch diaper changes, and constantly wants to hold and carry her. But for as sweet as she is toward her, she has rebelled in her own way. Just yesterday alone she dumped her entire cup of water on the floor, squirted lip gloss all over the kitchen floor, climbed into Eva’s crib and threw everything out, refused a nap, dumped the water out of the humidifier in her room, and chewed on Eva’s pacifiers. l have felt like I was going to lose my mind, and at a complete loss for how to both give Aubrey the attention she obviously needs, while also making it clear that expressing her frustrations in these ways is not ok. 

This adjustment is a continuing work of art we are all painting in the ways we are able to. Today I’m saying a prayer for myself and all the mothers out there trying to balance new and old, life and love, and hoping to hold onto their precious selves in the midst of the beautiful chaos.