not ready yet
I don’t know about you guys, but just in the last few weeks, my Facebook has completely blown up with pregnancy announcements. Some for their first child, some for their second child, and even one for her 4th child. And most of those announcing adding additional children to their crew had children not long before or after we had MacKenna.
Now that MacKenna’s over a year old, we’re constantly getting asked when we’re going to pop out the next one. Well, really, I think we’ve been getting asked since before we even had MacKenna. With all those pregnancy announcements, we definitely felt that we needed to at least talk about when we would want another child. To put it simply, we’re just not ready yet.
Everyone who asks, I say the same thing…
How could I possible love another child as much as I love her?
I would absolutely LOVE to be pregnant again. It was seriously one of the best times of my life and changed the way I viewed my body and how I viewed food. It’s not the pregnancy part that scares me, it’s what comes after the pregnancy that scares me.
MacKenna has been an easy baby. Except for her 6th nerve palsy, she’s very rarely sick, she’s an extremely happy baby, she’s smart, funny, and a bit mischievous. She’s been a blast to play with and I love every second we spend together and miss her every second we’re apart. She’s made me a better person and I can’t imagine my life without her.
But, having a newborn was hard. Like really hard. Harder than anything I’ve ever done in my life (including my first year of teaching). It was certainly an adjustment. So, what would happen if we throw another baby into the mix? What would happen to that time I get to spend with MacKenna? How will she feel? I already deal with a ton of Mommy Guilt from being so busy. How could I possibly be able to handle working, coaching, and caring for 2 children? It’s just totally overwhelming to me.
I guess that’s my sign that I’m just not ready yet. I’m not ready to face those challenges because I’m scared. I’m scared of the changes that would occur. I’m afraid of having less time: less time for MacKenna, less time for Matt, less time for work, and less time for me. It really goes back to that decision of having your first child. Taking time to be unselfish, to raise and care for an infant, and to give your whole heart to someone else. I’m not ready to give up more of that yet.
We know that we want another child (maybe more?) sometime, but we won’t be making a pregnancy announcement anytime soon. We do know that we don’t want them to be too far apart in age, so hopefully it also won’t be years from now. I mean, really, we’d just be doing everyone a favor by making more adorably cute babies…
Do you have more than one child? How did/do you balance having more than one child and other commitments?