The question I get asked most often these days is “how is life with two kids?” Most of the time the people asking have more than one kid of their own, so they know the answer:

Having two kids is MUCH harder than having one!

The fact that I haven’t published a blog post since May should give some indication of how I usually answer that question. Life with two….is complicated.

When you have your first child, you are in a bit of a haze for the first few months. You can’t actually believe that you created a child, and that you have this awesome responsibility now that you didn’t have just days before. You are careful about everything, and sleep with one eye open for months. Nothing is ever too annoying and you are so excited to have a child, that everything else takes a back seat.

And for twenty-five months that was us. Cameron was the main focus. Before he was born we took most of the available baby classes. After he arrived we had a routine figured out quickly and stuck with it for a year. Feedings, naps, walks, etc. Everything was by the book. Despite marrying a doctor, we’d call the pediatrician more often than I’d like to admit. As a new parent you are nervous all the time. You can’t believe that what you are doing is the right thing. It takes over a year to gain the confidence to think that you are doing this parenting thing correctly.

When the second kid arrives, things are different. They just are. There is a level of “I’ve been there before” cockiness. But there is also a complete memory lapse of how “you did it before.” I can change diapers in my sleep, but how about getting the baby to stop crying? It is hard to really remember how you did it before. Maybe you black it out? Maybe you were so tired you really don’t remember? Erin is a little smaller than Cam ever was so she reacted differently to almost everything. Eating. Napping. Crying. Even if I could remember exactly how I got Cam to sleep when he was five months old, it doesn’t matter. These are different kids.

You lose that cockiness pretty quickly by the way. Not because you can’t figure it out on the fly. You can. But when I was raising Cam as a 4-month-old, I didn’t have a two-and-a-half year old running around the house. I think that is biggest thing we didn’t fully see coming. Something as routine as loading up the car now takes twice as long. Walking the dog can be a comedy of errors that I’m sure is entertainment for the whole neighborhood. Just chasing Cam around the park is much more difficult when you’re carrying or pushing an extra 18 pounds. Six months ago Cameron was very much under my watchful eye. Nowadays, he has full run of the house for the time it takes me to get Erin down for a nap.

Erin just turned six-months old. That means that Cameron is now closer to three than two. This is happening at warp speed (expect on the hard days, those are in slow motion!). To answer the question that we started with, I would say it is somewhere between twice and ten times as hard (depending on the day) to be at home with two kids every day. But watching Cameron seek out his little sister to give her a hug and a kiss every morning, or seeing her face light up when Cameron shoots her a smile makes it all worth it. Most of the time. Life with two is pretty great.