The Third Child

No, I’m not pregnant. Holy cow, can you even imagine?

No. The third child was a friend of Alyssa’s we hosted on Friday evening. She’s a very nice girl. She’s the one who went with us to Cedar Point this past summer and we all had just a lovely time.

She went with me and A and O to run our usual Saturday morning/afternoon schedule. We hit the library, had lunch and then headed to Walmart for groceries.

Tangent: Can I ask why people have to take the whole family to Walmart? Yes, I’m a woman who took three kids with me on Saturday but we got behind a group of people who were irritating as hell. There were FIVE adults with two cards and in one of the carts was an infant in a car seat. I want to know why every single one of those adults had to go to Walmart and they had to cart that poor baby with them? One adult couldn’t have stayed home with the baby? One or even two people couldn’t have gone grocery shopping while the other three (or four) stayed home with the baby?

I mean, I get it. Sometimes a new mom needs to get out. So let the mom go with Grandma or even her husband while the others STAY HOME with the baby.

Okay, wait, the pot is calling me and telling me I’m the kettle… End Tangent

While at Walmart, I was hit by how much extra work that one extra kid is.

It reminded me of a coworker who told me during my entire pregnancy with Olivia that having a second baby was so easy, that she’s just roll into the routine and it wouldn’t be a big deal at all to add a second child to our current family of three.

Either that woman was a liar or my second child was WAY harder than her second child. Or, third possibility, I was just way worse at adjusting to the work a second child adds to the family. That third option is definitely a possibility, considering how I felt on Saturday.

It’s not even that the girls were in any way bothersome, it was just that they were there and there was so many of them. I felt like the four of us were taking up so much space in the aisles. I was constantly reminding them to stay behind me so we weren’t trying to go down the aisles four people wide.

That third child caused so much angst for me. I’m not even really sure why. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t my actual child and so I felt like I had to be more patient, kinder, cooler? I don’t know.

What I do know for sure, it that it’s a good thing we stopped at two because I was absolutely not cut out to be the mother of three.

My hat is off to all the moms out there with more than two children. You are absolutely heroes.