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I’m supposed to be 2 months pregnant by now on baby #2.
My husband and I have always talked about having two kids. We have an 18-month-old girl now. I got my dental health in check and got in with an OB/GYN in town for a preconception visit. We had our ducks in a row you could say, ready to start trying for baby #2 like planned. But then we had a conversation that started something like this: “Maybe it would be better to stop at one.”
My experience as a stay-at-home mom with my baby girl was — ahem — not joyful. She is a very high-needs difficult baby, though thankfully perfectly healthy. I won’t go into the crazy details, but those first 4 months, 8 months — hell it’s still fucking hard. I really don’t think I have it in me for another baby.
I was at the park the other day and saw a father with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old telling the older one “no” to playing on this or that because he had to watch out for the safety of the little one. It made me wonder about all the divided attention and “no’s” I’d tell my daughter with baby #2, and how that would change our relationship. I kind of just want to give her all my attention.
Then my husband and I talked of all the passing of responsibility back and forth between who takes the baby and who does the chores, or who gets downtime. With a second child, we would get even less time together, and less personal time for much needed self-care, restoration, rest. We decided that it would be better on our marriage to take the pressure off and just enjoy the one baby/toddler that we have now and enjoy each other now, because we really love each other and miss spending time together without a kid around. We decided to be one and done, stop at perfection.
Babies are hard.
But then I learned something about my husband that I really admire. He said when our daughter’s older, and if she wants a sibling, we could adopt a young child — maybe 3 to 6 years old. He then went on to say how amazing would that be to adopt a child who so badly needs a family.
So that’s our new plan.
