Five?

Maren is five months old today. She's at my favorite baby stage-- she sleeps through the night, smiles, giggles, rolls all over the place, lights up when I walk into the room, naps fairly predictibly, doesn't fear other people, provides hours of entertainment for her brothers and sister, and just generally makes my life happy. I love babies-- all babies, but I especially love this baby. She's just so good and beautiful and happy that she makes it easy to have a baby.

And that's just exactly the problem. This is probably pretty predictible, but I'm feeling so baby hungry. Not baby hungry in the sense that I want to get pregnant again right now, but baby hungry in the sense that I feel incredibly nostalgic and sad that this is the last time I'll ever have a five-month-old.

I did everything I could to guard against feeling this way. I documented all of my pregnancy because I knew it would be the last one. I gave away my maternity clothes within a month of Maren's birth. I've already handed down the baby boy and baby girl clothes I won't get the chance to use again. I got an IUD because I knew that taking the pill would make me confront the end of my childbearing every single day. Whenever anyone makes a comment about my four kids or my large family, I'm sure to comment (even when people don't ask), that we're done now that we have four.

So, why not have another one? I think it would be sort of a selfish decision on my part. I want another baby because I want another baby. I'm not at all sure that I want another toddler (I've been potty-training this week, and I know I don't want to do that anymore) or another school-age kid or another teenager (I haven't even gotten into that phase yet, but I'll already have four teenagers at once for a little while and I have a feeling I'll be in for it big time). When we started our family, I said I wanted four kids. Eddie said he wanted two. So four was not the compromise number-- four was what I wanted. Eddie has done all of the compromising in that boat. I'm in the best shape of my life, and it wasn't easy to get there.

I'm also not sure that it's fair to the kids I have. Eddie is gone so much and I'm stretched so thin that I wonder what kind of impact it would put on them, especially the one that would have to sit between Bryce and Annie in the back seat of the van (I did that this weekend and it was two of the most miserable hours of my recent life). Is forcing a child to spend his or her entire childhood of sitting in the back seat between Bryce and Annie too much to ask to satisfy my baby hunger?

--originally published 5/23/07