Two for the price of one

This one has been rumbling around since, well probably since I started to write this whole blog, but I feel it's the right time to start this train of thought now with some of the recent events happening. We've always talked about wanting multiple children which in itself is a strange thought to have. Logically, having one child should be enough as you can pour all of your love, time and money at giving them the best possible start in life, but for some reason it doesn't seem enough. I guess part of it is that we both are one of three children and have good, healthy and strong relationships with our sisters (no natural uncles for Jake! No English uncles for Jake either for that matter!) and I think we both want Jake to have that experience. However, we've always talked about having just two and the more entrenched our plans become, the more unlikely we are to deviate from those plans.

I mentioned the recent events that prompted this post, so I'll try and enumerate some of them. The first is that Jake is growing (no surprise there) and growing to such an extent that he's not far off filling his whole cot. I remember when we first put him in there and he looked so tiny; amazing how times change. We've put a lot of thought into his next bed which in turn has got us talking a lot about our plans for the second baby as there will be (according to the current version of The Plan) a few months when Baby 2 is old enough for the cot and we're still in our 2 bedroom house in England. The nursery isn't a huge space, but will sleep the two of them with all their clothes and some books for bedtime quite comfortably as long as we're clever with storage and furniture. To this end, we bought Jake's first toddler bed last weekend and the mattress looks enormous! I'm sure at some point he'll grow out of it as he has with the cot, but it's another sign of our little boy growing up. We probably won't move him out of the cot till we're back from the States in August, but that change will be a big one when it comes.

Another recent event is the fact that quite a few people that we know are planning on getting pregnant in the near future, which again has got us talking and structuring The Plan. We've always talked about having the second baby over here to make use of the free health care and amazing maternity leave, but the draw to the US becomes stronger each time we visit. However, we've made the firm commitment to ourselves that whilst our hearts say go, our heads know we should stay and see The Plan out till the summer of 2016. Interestingly, in all its versions, we've never got this close to the conclusion of The Plan, having always changed and extended it in previous years. I think the fact that we carried out the Jake project successfully and on time has given us the impetus and the belief to stick to The Plan with the knowledge that it'll happen.

Finally, our worries about how Jake will cope with a younger sibling are lessening. There's a brand new baby at his nursery who is often there when I drop him off and he goes over and smiles, cooing "baby" at it and giggling. He's also taken to taking a soft toy (most often Hobbes but sometimes other bears too) around and looking after them as we do to him. This often cracks me up as he pretends to put a pacifier in their mouths or feed them some food, but the best so far has been when I'm pretty sure he put Hobbes in time out, then picked him up and cuddled him to say sorry. Needless to say, Hobbes didn't do it again.

It's interesting seeing our conversations returning to familiar patterns, ones that we had in the build up to having Jake. We've talked endlessly about the finances and the space (both a little tighter than last time around), discussed possible names till we've exhausted just about all combinations (we're all set for a girl and are narrowing down our boy options) and tried to imagine the future with two of them. I was famously quoted in the immediate aftermath of Jake's birth as saying "there's only one of him and two of us; how hard can it be?" (the short answer is: very!) but I don't think I'll be making a similar comment when Baby 2 rocks up. However, if our experience with Jake is anything to by, it'll be exciting, exhausting and a whole new set of experiences for all three of us.