Three Children

You know, I never really believed people when they claimed having a third kid made things disproportionately harder. The claim seemed sort of self indulgent in a pity-me sort of way. But I'm finding it to be true. It's not something I can really put my finger on, either. It's almost as if that third child brought with her a time-devouring salve and smeared it on every aspect of our lives.

Let me backpedal a bit, though. I don't mean to blame our baby for all this. She exceeds my idea of an angelic kid. She almost never cries. She smiles at almost anyone and then smiles more when they return the grin. She is happy to be held, happy to sit, happy when her sisters play with her, happy when the cat sits near her, happy...most of the time. She likes most of the foods we've recently begun introducing her to (just tonight, Elizabeth cheered her fondness for avocados: "Yay, we're three for three!" Apparently, it is important to Elizabeth that our kids like avocados). And so forth and so on. It's not as if she is an unpleasant addition to our family. But an addition she is.

The third car seat makes both passenger cars feel cramped, especially if we drive for more than 15 minutes. Rowyn has just stopped taking naps, but it doesn't really matter, because Amaya still naps a few times a day, which makes any excursion hectic for Elizabeth, who is always aware of when she needs to be home to get the baby to sleep. At night, the bedtime routine takes three hours. We start getting Amaya ready for bed just before six. Rowyn needs to be asleep at seven. Sonora usually falls asleep between 8 and 8:30. And before all that, we've got to cook dinner and eat. So our evenings are a fairly frenzied race from the time I get home from work until all the kids are asleep. There isn't a lot of gown-up time for Elizabeth or me because we're usually cleaning up the house, catching up on work or other errands, and preparing for bed ourselves so that we can get a reasonable amount of sleep.

And this last point--sleep--has been the real killer. This is the area in which Amaya is less than superb. She wakes up often (sometimes every hour) throughout the night, and rarely sleeps past 5:30 in the morning. Rowyn has been waking up three to four times a night, sometimes screaming and thrashing about making all kinds of weird irrational demands. If she wakes in one of these fits, it takes at least an hour to get her calmed down and another half an hour to get her back to sleep. Sonora is a super champ sleeper these days, but the other two are making up the difference. Elizabeth and I are both night people who enjoy sleeping in. But we've had to amend our ways and we are enjoying life a little bit less because of it. When one of us does take some "me" time by staying up late, we invariably sleep far too little and spend the whole next day grouchy (Elizabeth), groggy and stupid (me), or both.

There are other ways our lives have been complicated by having a third child (by American standards, our house is quite small for a family of five), but I'm beginning to feel like a spoiled brat as I think about poor me with a really great wife and three wonderful healthy kids living together with plenty of food to eat in a warm, dry house with electricity and running water. So I'm going to stop complaining now.

I promised a friend I'd post a recent picture of our family on this blog. Problem is, we don't take that many pictures of ourselves (by today's standards). If Elizabeth and I didn't have sisters and sisters-in-law who love photography, we would have rather few quality photos of any of us. Below are a few photos we've snapped over the last couple of months.

I'm not quite sure what was going on in the photo below, but I'm guessing Sonora was behind it. She builds forts, beds, hideouts, unicorn traps, etc. all day long all throughout the house.

Besides avocados, Amaya is fond of several other foods, including rice noodles.

Elizabeth kept the older two busy for hours transforming one of our front windows into "stained glass." I hope when we eventually clean the artwork away, the glue truly is water soluble.