Life with 3: Actually, it totally does live up to the hype

Last year, i wrote about how adding a third child was no big deal , when we were a breezy one month into the experience.  Now that we are 15 months in, I'd like to amend my opinion. 

Here are some things I didn't take into consideration when writing that first blog:

Easy newborn

1.  Ivy was a SUPER easy baby.  Especially as a newborn.  She slept all the time (probably 20 hours a day).  She fed easily, she let me set her down, she hardly cried, she would fall asleep anywhere - it was pretty unbelievable, honestly.  Now that she's older, she still has a super sweet personality, but she's a very typical toddler - very active and independent, and needing more in terms of interactive play and snack preparation and supervision.  She's a full time project, which hugely changes the dynamic of how easy or hard it is to balance everything else.  Which leads into item 2...

2.  Attention for each individual child is spread super thin.  Even when Kenny's home, there are times when it's very challenging that the kids outnumber the adults.  You get these moments where Josh needs intensive help with his homework, Zoey wants to read a book, and Ivy's climbing the bookshelf.  Or Josh needs

Active toddler

supervision in the bath, Zoey wants to play a board game, and Ivy wanders into the kitchen to eat some dog food.  It's a precarious and crazy making project to meet all the physical and emotional needs.  Hats off to all of you who somehow do this with MORE than three.

3.  It makes life more fun and interesting to have kids in a range of stages, but more challenging too.

For example, it's fun to play increasingly complicated games and read increasingly sophisticated stories to the big kids, but it's hard to do this well when you have to pause every 30 seconds to check on the one year old.  And it's restful to cuddle the one year old to bed, except when the two bigs are simultaneously having an unsupervised wrestling match downstairs.  There's just not a lot of down time in this stage of life (except for breaks graciously provided by my husband and in-laws).

This blog probably sounds like such a debbie downer, but I don't mean it that way.  It's more of an attempt to be honest about the challenges of of raising three kids.   (I'm sure there were some of you who read that first blog about how adding a third child is easy peasy and thought "just wait" - and I'm telling you that you were right.)  While it's challenging, it is absolutely worth it - I can't imagine life without any of the three in it, they all add something special to our family.  There might be forthcoming blogs about that.  In the meantime:  any advice from veteran parents about how to parent older kids well and still keep the one year old alive?