
The decision to have three children was a conscious one, but the reality of this decision was not.
"I have three children, I feel like I have eight," my husband said just days after the baby and I arrived home from hospital.
"There are so many of them," I said to my husband, referring to our beautiful, adored offspring. I could have been talking about a swarm of mosquitoes, their pesky abundance driving us back indoors.
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It was not a matter of just throwing more pasta in the pot, as I had naively thought. 'What’s one more?'
The addition of another child created a whole new dynamic that left us feeling outnumbered and helpless.
It didn’t help that number three did not properly take to feeding straight away, or that all three children were yet to be shipped off to school, or that three months into this new situation we decided to renovate our home.
Whatever the case, the enormity of the shift from two children to three is not widely publicised.
As with child-rearing, all information is geared up to the event, with little pre-warning to the weeks after the birth. No one took me aside and said, ‘Look, what you are about to go through is ridiculous’.
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Even when a mum, expecting her third child, recently asked me about life with three children, my response was, "Do you really want to know?" Because like childbirth, you fear what you don’t know, and then you fear what you do know.
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