10 Weeks as a Mother of Three: Some Storytelling

Jillian will be 10 weeks old on Thursday, and Jamie and I have found ourselves numerous times actually high-fiving each other for freaking DOING THIS. Like, WE ARE STILL ALIVE. And so are our kids. And we’re HAPPY more often than overwhelmed.

and RIGHT NOW we are in the newborn stage that found us completely drowning the last two times but somehow now we are rockin’ and rollin’ (I think) checking days off the calendar, and like I said, freaking doing this three kid thing. The very thing that we swore our stress levels would never let us do. We knew we weren’t cut out to survive parenting three babes. HA. HA. HA. Joke was on us because parenting three kids WE WOULD.

I think our expectations that this season would be 100% chaos 24/7 has led us to a place of being pleasantly surprised by how not totally nuts things are, if that makes sense?

But don’t get me wrong. We have had 100+ moments were we’ve been in the absolute thick of it with one or more of the girls and my anxiety level has shot sky-high. Some of these moments are funny though, like Sadie last night leaving church, carrying a million things she’d collected there throughout the night (a water bottle, papers from the back of the seats, a pack of cookies, a pen, etc.), who trips and falls flat on her face TWICE right in front of our three pastors, who just looked as us with smiles of WE SEE YOU AND YOU’VE GOT THIS while just trying to get the heck out the door to the van with all three kids in tow. Yeehaw.

10 weeks under our belts. Whew.

The first four to six weeks were hard. Very, very, hard. Trying to figure out how to take care of the kids and ourselves and the house and meet everyone’s needs (and wants) was a doozy.

Though I gave myself grace to basically do nothing but stay home, take it easy, and accept any and all help offered, it was still a hard month of figuring out how to do life day in and day out.

But the last four as a whole have been pretty darn swell. All three girls are in such different stages with different things that challenge us, and challenge us they do.

For this reason, Jamie and I have come together as a team more than we ever have in our almost nine years of being married. I need Jamie, and he needs me. We need each other’s hands, we need the other to be calm, we need to both put our family of five first before every single other thing. And I feel like we have, and having a solid teammate in Jamie has made our marital satisfaction and parenting satisfaction much higher. We need each other and appreciate each other in this season. We’ve said many times that I couldn’t do this without him, and he without me, physically and emotionally.

Three kids is awesome, but it’s all hands on deck!

Breaking things down more specifically, here’s a more detailed picture of how things are operating around here.

We’ve both been able to get out of the house numerous times for a guys night/girls night/bible study/etc., leaving the other one at home to tackle bedtime with three kids. Not only have we both been able to do this a couple times, we’ve actually encouraged the other to go. I feel like Jamie and I have this new mutual understanding that in order to parent three babes, we’re going to both need time away to recharge and decompress. So while neither of us necessarily enjoys tackling all three kids solo, we deeply know it’s so necessary for both of us. The kids melt down enough as it is; We don’t need the adults having frequent meltdowns too. 😉

The baby carrier is EVERYTHING. I mean it when I say it has given us freedom in ways we didn’t expect. She is happy to hang in the carrier, suck her paci, and eventually take a long nap, so we wear her everywhere. Restaurants, stores, church, friends’ homes, around the house if she’s fussy or overtired, etc. It’s been a life saver. Sometimes I forget I’m wearing her because she’s so content for an hour or two at a time. (We’ve been using .)

75% of the time she’s in her car seat, she’s crying. And she’s in her car seat several times a day. Third kid life. 🙂 I’ve learned to tune it now and not let it work me up. Sometimes I hardly notice it at this point. If I know she has a full belly and dry diaper, I try to just let it roll and not bother me  because I know she’s just annoyed at being in the seat, and being mad won’t hurt her.

We’ve been working (hard!!) on good sleep habits since she was four weeks old, and they’ve definitely paid off. We’ve done things very differently with Jillian than we did with Hadley and Sadie, and she’s thankfully sleeping well. We put her down around 7:30 p.m., and she usually wakes up around 2 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., and then up for good around 7 a.m. It’s super manageable for now, which is contributing to being happier in the newborn stage than we have been in the past.

I don’t like oversharing about our big girls too much, so without going into much detail I can say that both of them have had their own unique adjustment issues to adding a sister to the fam. I’ve talked to their pediatrician about it, and he said that even though Hadley and Sadie are completely thrilled and obsessed with baby Jillian, even positive change is difficult for kids to digest. To see the big girls having these adjustment issues (that they weren’t even able to identify as such) occasionally left me with heavy feelings of guilt at times, but I know Jillian is such a gift to them and that these adjustment side effects are so, so temporary.

Our community has been everything, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about this in the future because I personally want to remember the many unique ways we were cared for so that I can care for others in these ways in the future. Our moms, Jamie’s boss, our friends, my sister, our church family… they have all made us feel very seen. These people know us so well that they’ve been able to immediately pick up if we’re feeling tense or overwhelmed and offered an encouraging word, a joke, a meal, some coffee, prayer, or helping hands. The selflessness has been unlike anything I’ve experience before and has taught me many lessons. Ahh, I can’t wait to share because community is a beautiful, vital thing.

I started supplementing with formula last week, which was so necessary for me. Breastfeeding is going flawlessly, but since I’m not routinely pumping, I was having a difficult time pumping enough to leave with Jamie or others if I needed a moment away. I found that even if Jamie or someone else was willing to keep Jillian, I had to take her with me because I wasn’t able to pump enough to leave with said person. We finally decided that supplementing with formula was a good/necessary thing, and it has been. I’m grateful for this option of feeding her.

I don’t know any other way to say this, and though this probably sounds so terrible, we honestly feel the least inconvenienced by Jillian than we have by our other newborns. Yep, that sounds bad, but let me explain. We have been parents for almost six years and are so used this life by now that Jillian just feels like one more little human to take care of. She’s simply just one of the crew!

However, when we had Hadley, I had to adjust to my entire life being different. That first baby changes EVERYTHING, and that took a while for me to get used to. With Sadie, we struggled because of the end of Jamie’s third deployment. He was gone until she was seven weeks old, and then we had weeks where we had to figure out how to parent together again. Doing this with a two year old and a newborn was so difficult for us. Deployment just stinks at all stages of the process.

It’s like a first-time teacher. The first year is hard because you’re doing it all for the first time. The second year can also be hard because while you’re more comfortable with what you’re doing, you’re still looking for things to change/improve and are still building your confidence in your role. But the third year… the third year you’re good. You generally know what you’re doing. You may get thrown a curveball here or there and have a bad day every now and then, but generally you are comfortable in your role as a teacher and are happy to tackle it.

This is kind of how I feel about a third kid. She’s just one of us and adds immeasurable joy to our lives.

Everything else has fallen to the wayside, and I think that’s contributing to the idea of not being too overwhelmed. If I get to the gym, GREAT. If I can blog, AWESOME. If I can hang with a friend or put away all the laundry, FANTASTIC. But anything outside of tending to the kids is a bonus right now. I’m okay with being “all in” with mothering right now because I know there will be more time for “me” once the girls are all more independent. I look forward to that for sure, but I know it’ll come sooner than I realize.

So to summarize the 1,621 words I just wrote, parenting three kids so far feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but also leaves me feeling the most whole I’ve ever felt. There’s the cliche saying of “my heart is so full”, but that’s how I really feel. It’s a physical feeling of a lot of love.

I look at these three babies who make me crazy and anxious and overwhelmed, and I recognize every single day how much I absolutely love and adore them. They are my life. They are my legacy, my world, the most important thing I will ever do. And I believe that so confidently and so fully. I may be completely consumed with all things motherhood right now with more kids than I have arms, but I know this is where I’m supposed to be. And to know that feels good, like I’ve arrived. And I just hope and pray I do a good job.

More: On the Night Before You Were Born and The Rollercoaster of Being a First-Time Mom, (and here’s the follow up  to the original “Rollercoaster of a First-Time Mom” post)