That’s right, round two here we come!! We did it, and now we are nervous. The decision to have a second child now seems completely irrational when you look at the hard facts. You couldn’t afford the first one, your social and professional lives have suffered, and you will never again have furniture that isn’t stained. It’s like crawling out of a poop tunnel after escaping from prison, deciding freedom isn’t for you, and turning around to go back through for more. That is the stinky trip I made the sober(ish) decision to embark upon.
For those of you still in the throes of your first pregnancy or recent delivery of 1.0, you can’t imagine signing up for another round. The sneaky part is that you completely forget about all the physical discomfort and emotional havoc that comes with pregnancy, labor and postpartum. This is called “postpartum dementia”, because I just decided to call it that. This is where you lose the ability to connect with any of the pain and feel completely fine to go through all of it repeatedly until you lose all feeling in your lower extremities. Hence a world birth rate of 255 babies per minute—that’s 134,028,000 placentas hitting the floor or field, depending, every year people!!! You are welcome world. I am doing my part to contribute.
You tell yourself that your little one will only be able to feel the full joy of life if she can share it with another child who is blessed with the exact same set of amazing parents. WRONG! Do you know how amazing it is to be the only child in your parents’ and, if you’re lucky, grandparents’ lives? I am surprised we don’t have more first born children marching on Washington petitioning that 2nd and 3rd borns be pushed off the highest peak! Don't take this as me saying we should all come from single-child families. As a middle child myself, I am very thankful that my parents drank the same crazy juice as everyone else and decided to double down (they even went for thirds later), but I am certain that my older sibling spent the better part of my youth trying to figure out a way to feed me to the fishes, and can I really blame her? She had a world that was completely run by her giggles and scheduled around her potty breaks. When I showed up, it put a huge cramp in her style. She would have likely been a Mensa candidate if my parents hadn’t dispersed their attention and wisdom across all three of us. To my first child: I apologize for ruining your chances of being exceptional.
In all seriousness, we are thrilled to have the chance to give this parenting thing another go. Surely we can’t screw up two children. There’s always one that’s good right?
D is completely underwhelmed by the idea of a sibling.