Should We Have a Second Child?

Photo by Candice Compton Robertson from Flickr

About the same time that our daughter turned 1, the questions started coming in. “So, are you going to have any more?” I’m not sure what it is about people…why they’re in a rush for US to have another kid. We would always politely answer, “Not sure yet!” all the while laughing that nervous laugh.

And it was the truth. We had no clue if we wanted more kids. We were just trying to get through learning how to parent the one we just had! It is a big transition to welcome a child into your life. There’s major adjustment. We were still adjusting.

As she entered her second year of life those terrible two’s hit with a vengeance. Our beautiful baby girl was turning into this little monster. During this phase of her life, we were set on NOT having any more kids. If anyone asked, we pretty much said, “We don’t think so. Not right now, anyway.” It was extremely hard for us to imagine bringing another child into our lives – not with the amount of stress we were experiencing at the time.

We knew it would pass. We knew we’d get her to act right by teaching her that her behavior was unacceptable. But, really…why in the world would we want to go through that again? It didn’t seem like something we’d want to bring upon ourselves.

When she turned three and her behavior was a thousand times better, we continuously went back and forth on the matter.

Should we? It would be nice. But…I don’t know…

Conversations just like that went on for months and months. We saw the value in having another child. We knew it would be great for our baby girl to have a sibling. We knew we were good parents and that we love children. We knew all that.

And, yet…we weighed our pros and cons. Literally. We actually sat down one day and made a list of the pros and cons of having a second child. Because we’re highly analytical like that.

At the time, our list looked something like this:

Pros

• Baby girl will have a brother/sister to grow up with.
• Kids can play together and entertain each other.
• Having a child is one of THE greatest things we’ve ever done.

Cons

• Money
• Stress
• Potty training once again
• Tantrums
• Another c-section for me (See why.)
• Even less time for ourselves

As you can see, our reasons for having another child were outweighed by the reasons not to. But, even still, we knew that deep down inside we’d love to have another baby. We had always wanted two – even before we got married. All the cons on our list were not enough to quiet the love we felt for our baby girl and that we knew would increase with another baby in our house.

Having finally decided that yes, we would like to have another child, we had yet to decide as to when. I wanted to get my body in better shape for dealing with the extra weight from the pregnancy and to give myself a better recovery from the c-section. We also wanted to be better off financially, what with the economy not being great, etc.

Our baby girl is now four. And just a month or so ago, we realized, “Crap! If we wait much longer she’ll be well over 5, maybe even 6 by the time the baby is born.”

So, here we are. Though we were waiting for the “right time,” we’ve decided that the time is now. We don’t want a huge gap between our baby girl and her little brother or sister. I’ve been working on becoming more healthy over the last month and a half and we will figure out the rest.

We are ready to start trying for another baby.

Do you want more than one child or do you already have more than one? Why and how did you decide to have more than one child?

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Tagged as: baby, children, conceiving, Fertility, parenting, Pregnancy