Parents of twins can call me a wuss, it's cool

My wife texted me today to ask if I thought it would be funny if she posted on Facebook that she’s pregnant with twins. My immediate irrational conclusion was that this was her strange way of telling me that she was pregnant with twins. Immediate because that is how I come to conclusions when I’m being irrational, and irrational because, well, there’s just no fucking way, okay? I was at lunch with my coworkers, so I kept the panic under wraps and texted back simply “um…what?” To this she responded, “you know, for April Fool’s?” I had totally not realized what day it was. Sigh of relief. Sure honey, go for it. I don’t think she did it though. Moral qualms or some such nonsense.

There are those parents of multiple children who space them out a few years so as to give themselves a bit of a breather. Get the one out of diapers before getting another one in, be baby free for just a few, take a nice big gasp of air before diving back in. That sort of thing. My wife and I opted for the more masochistic route, spacing our boys out just a little over two years apart. All throughout our second pregnancy, we had a lot of really fun conversations with our eldest son, trying to help this little person understand that he would soon be joined by yet another little person, and that his status as the household’s only little person would be updated to the household’s biggest little person. And when youngest arrived, we found ourselves with two boys in diapers, two boys who liked to wake up in the middle of the night, two boys with a lot of constant need. We no longer have two in diapers, but now that youngest is mobile, we have two who can’t help but get into everything.

Though really, I don’t know for certain if it’s that much more painful or if it’s just a different brand of pain. I just sometimes wonder if our eldest got our better parenting selves, if maybe we now have less to give because they both still need so much, thus cheating the both of them. Although I’m not really losing much sleep over it. My youngest is taking care of all my sleep loss needs.