Four stockings for us

Well, Christmas happened.  We had a pretty fantastic Christmas, though there was no winter wonderland surprise to make it extra-magical like last year.  Still, it was full of joy, laughter, family, food, chaos, and a few rare moments of peace...very near perfect, in my book.

A few times during the midst of celebration, I felt something that has been tugging at me for awhile.  I feel so incredibly satisfied with our little family--Jeremy, the girls, and me.

I have wavered back and forth on my feelings about more children since Addison and Mackenzie were a little over a year old.  During that first year, the idea of 'more' was unfathomable, as it often took everything I could give to get through the days.  Since then, though, the idea of more children has been discussed with varying degrees of interest and slightly less trepidation.

At times, I get carried away thinking about what it would be like to have another baby.  I would love to experience a singleton pregnancy and have the opportunity to do it all again.  I know the second time around would find me much more confident in myself and my parenting abilities, and it would be nice to have a baby and actually sort of know what we were doing.  And really, one baby?  How hard could it be after the experience of multiples??

On the other hand, there is absolutely no guarantee that we would not have another set of twins.  (A family in my town has two sets of identical twins, one set of girls and one set of boys, that are about two years apart--yikes!)  While I feel reasonably sure we could handle it with slightly more ease than the first time around, I still feel a bit overwhelmed just thinking about the idea.  FOUR kids?

Also, even if we had a single baby, I do already have the girls to think about.  It would still be quite the handful to manage on a daily basis.  (Just for the record--if we were to have more babies, hypothetically speaking, it would not be until the girls are at least four-ish and are getting ready to attend public school. This used to seem so far away, but in reality, they will be three in about three months, so we are only fifteen-ish months away from this hypothetical timeline.)

Then there are all the random imagined worries...What if we had a girl and she feels left out by her older sisters?  Four to five years is a big age difference when you're little, plus there's the fact of the older two being twins and probably being naturally closer.  What would we do about bedrooms?  We have a three-bedroom house that we intend to stay in for several more years, so Addison & Mackenzie would have no option but to share a room.  That feels a little unfair to them, like we are saying, "Well, since you're the twins you will have to share, while your younger sibling gets a room of his/her own."  We could never fold the third row down in my Expedition, because there would have to be a child's seat in the third row.  (Silly concern, I know, but still.)

And so on and so forth.

I know all those concerns are things that any family thinks about before adding another child, and I know that in the scheme of things, none of them are too worrisome.  I also know that if we were to add another child to our family, these little things would become even smaller in light of the love we would feel for him or her.  I know all this, so really, it is not these tangible concerns that make me say I doubt we will have more children.

Mostly, it's the lack of a feeling that anything is missing in our family.  On Christmas morning, I wasn't thinking about what it would be like to have another little one opening presents or another stocking hanging on the mantle.  I don't look longingly at the baby aisle in stores, wishing I had a reason to buy the tiny onesies or brightly colored rattles.  I watch my astonishingly big girls navigate the potty almost without my help and mother their baby dolls and make block towers as tall as they are, and I don't grieve for the babies they really aren't anymore.

I am proud of my sweet girls, who will always be my babies, no matter how big they get, and I love our family of four.  We are happy, but more than that, I increasingly feel that we are complete.  Naturally, we reserve the right to change our minds at any time and to be incredibly happy about that, if it were to happen, but for the time being, I just don't think it could get much better than this.