This whole four-kid thing is a little daunting sometimes. I spent my whole pregnancy not sure how I felt about that number, and then I spent the first 2 weeks of Freedom’s life avoiding it.
FOUR kids. AHHHHHHHH! Find something else to think about.
– was generally the thought process.
I’m making friends with it now. There are great things about FOUR.
For example…
There is always a load of laundry to do. You may not see that as a benefit, exactly, but let’s go a little deeper.
1) If you try to set up a routine of always doing a load of laundry in the morning, what happens when you don’t have enough laundry for a full load? You don’t get a very good routine, do you? And that would make for inconsistent laundry-washing, overwhelmingly huge mountains of dirty clothes, cats and dogs living together… Craziness. Well, we’ve safely avoided that catastrophe and I am always blessed with enough dirty clothing to run a load in the morning. Now I deal with overwhelmingly huge piles of clean clothes, but hey. A nice-smelling messy laundry room is better than a stinky one, right?
2) If you’re doing a laundry daily, your kids need fewer clothes. At the most, 4 outfits for the littles, 3 for the biggers. 🙂
3) You don’t care so much when your kids spill yogurt all down their front, fall in mud puddles, change their outfits just for fun, or color with Sharpies and end up with permanent-polka-dots on their shirts. Okay, maybe you DO care about the permanent polka dots (anyone know of anything that gets Sharpie out of clothing?)… but at least p.p.d. was fun to write out. Aside from the Sharpie incident, though, I’ve found I have a much more relaxed attitude toward their clothes-soiling episodes because -hey- I’m doing another load of laundry tomorrow anyway!
Another great thing about FOUR is that the three bigger ones have banded together to form a self-entertaining committee in light of the time I have to spend catering to newborn needyness. They may or may not break out into big, screaming fights more often than not, but they’re gaining more independence which is good, right?
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