Monthly Archives: January 2017

It’s only fitting that I break a four-month blogging break with the news that we’re having baby number four!

And quite soon — the end of March, in fact.  And it’s only one, another major news bulletin.

We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, because we’re wild that way.  We don’t go out on the town as often in this stage of life, so we get our kicks by delivery room shouts of genders.  To each their own.

Henry and Arden will be freshly three and a half, and Hunter will be 22 months old, so this puts us firmly at four kids under age four.  I’m just disappointed Kate Middleton couldn’t keep up.  We really had a thing going there for awhile, with our first two pregnancies resulting in births just four and eight days apart, respectively.  Would it have been too much to ask for her to give birth twelve days before me, to keep the pattern alive?

I’m endlessly grateful to God that this pregnancy has been a cakewalk.  I don’t know how I would have managed to care for the others if this newbie had made me viciously ill.  I have several friends who endure this and I don’t know how they manage.  Now that I’m 28 weeks, I’m in the third trimester and feeling more of the effects, which is fine considering I’ve had such an easy time until now.

The twins are really excited about having a new baby in the house, though they each demand that it be their corresponding gender.  Arden won’t hear of it being a boy, and Henry doesn’t even respond if you say it’s a girl.  So that might be tricky on delivery day.  But I comfort myself with the knowledge that literally all of the siblings throughout time have had their newest sibling’s gender be a surprise, except in the last twenty years.  Plus we talk to them every day about how it could be either and how great it will be either way.  They’re like….sure.

Hunter really doesn’t know what’s coming, but all signs are positive.  He adores his cousin Kinsley, eight months, and he points to my belly and says “Baby” and gives it a kiss or a raspberry.  It’s adorable.

Mike and I are really joyful, really excited, and really thankful.  We’re also really aware of what it’s like to have a newborn with other small children, so we’re luxuriating in the quiet evenings and long hours of sleep we have now.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t filled with dread at the amount of work ahead of me, but I feel much more experienced this time around, and much more aware of how quickly that newborn turns into a three month old, and how quickly that three month old is a sitting-up-and-eating-solids six month old, and how quickly that six month old is crawling, then walking, then turning one and making me weep for my newborn again.

So I’m going to take it day by day — who am I kidding? — hour by hour, meal by meal, nap by nap, until we’re steady on our feet and our lives are functioning again.  I’m praying the Lord will show me the best way to help myself; maybe a mother’s helper once a week?  Maybe preschool in the fall?  Maybe a minivan?  HA — the minivan is certain, people.  It’s happening in the next two months.  I just need a bumper sticker that reads, “Respect the Van” and I’ll be locked and loaded.

Did I just use a gun metaphor in my baby announcement post?

How things have changed.

Bring on baby number four!