As a middle aged dude, I’ve dealt with a certain amount of change in my life: new jobs, marriage, kids, and many others. Some changes are small and we adapt with some effort (think work promotion); others are bigger and take more time to integrate (getting married, a career change). And then there are the monumental changes that transform our lives forever. My wife Lori and I went through one of these when we added two more children to our family (twins), giving us four kids under the age of four. I’m sometimes asked by both friends and strangers alike how it’s different now that we have four, especially since they are all so small. I wrote the following series of anecdotes to answer that question. Although they are connected not by a narrative, but instead by a theme of general chaos and exhaustion, they do tell a story. It’s a story of love, humor, and making it through one day at a time. I’ll explore many of these tales in more detail with future posts. I hope you enjoy it!
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I started clipping my toenails on a Monday recently. I didn’t finish until Thursday. Left foot done; right foot hangin’ with scraggly nails for three days, shredding my sock. I just couldn’t finish the job until Thursday.
We currently have eight car seats in use. Yes, EIGHT. I know. Five years ago we researched car seats and bought a new one for our priceless little firstborn. Now we look for freebies on Next Door or Craig’s List. Most of those safety recalls aren’t that big a deal, right?
We usually need two babysitters to get away for an evening. Surprising as it is, no one person wants to care for all four of our little people alone. The fact that they are maniacs might be a factor.
We bathe our children about once every seven or eight days. They smell hot and musty and have dirty little Oliver Twist feet by the time we get to it. We used to do it daily.
Someone is crying 30% of the time. A gnarly tantrum used to be the exception. Now five minutes of uninterrupted silence causes alarm and panic.
One day in our minivan I shoveled up my daughter’s fresh vomit with an old McNuggets carton. Afterward I truly meant to get the van detailed, but I couldn’t get to it for two months. And even then, a close friend offered and did it for me.
I entered parenthood cringing at the idea of any kind of slimy stuff on my hands. Somewhere between two and four kids that part of me died. Now I’ll occasionally wipe a slimy booger from my daughter’s face with my thumb and forefinger. And getting poop on my hands during a diaper change doesn’t even register.
Someone is always sick during the winter months. Last year it got so bad we had five of us down at one time. One afternoon I was transporting Mia up the stairs. She was barfing on my neck as I was pooping my own pants, trying like hell to get us both to the bathroom in time.
I used to poop alone. I think I considered solitary defecation a first world right. That changed about two years ago. I tried locking everyone out, but it’s tough to do your business with that kind of desperate crying and pounding on the other side of the door. And leaving babies without supervision won’t win me any parenting awards. Maybe I should open the door, I thought. I don’t really want to, but maybe they’ll just hang out while I do my thing. As it turns out, they make demands like, “Hurry up!” and, my favorite, “Show us your poop!” I could probably poop in front of an audience now, should it come to that.
I can’t get anything done around the house. I’ve never been one to jump at the chance to fix the ice maker. But now it’s seriously difficult to get two minutes to change a light bulb or pick up a stray sock. Before Lucas and Liam came I painted almost our entire home’s interior. Now I can’t even consider taking on a two hour task like cleaning out a closet.
I am now an expert at sleep deprivation, like some kind of domestic Navy Seal. With our first two I fumbled my way through but it wasn’t pretty. Now I know my signs. Why do my calves hurt so much today? Why am I wearing a wool scarf when everyone else is in shorts? Why did I just rip my daughter’s head off when she asked me for water? Ahh, right. Dada needs a nap.
We constantly need to triage. With two we could mostly make it work, even when one of us was flying solo. Now? Total shit show. Pop quiz – which situation would you tackle first: A) infant boy is pulling the tail of our sometimes vicious and temperamental cat, B) toddler girl is peeing and SOBBING while other infant boy is curiously approaching the puddle on the wood floor, C) other toddler girl is thoroughly washing her hair and body with hand sanitizer.
We now explicitly request no gifts for any of our kids’ birthday parties. The volume of stuff we have come to own has gotten so extreme that I just kick things out of the way each night so I don’t break a leg in my morning haze. To ensure we get no more stuff, we simply ask in evites to please NOT bring any gifts. I typically add something like, “I’m not joking. PLEASE do not bring any gifts. Thank you!” (Even after this we typically get five or six.)
Corollary to this: we don’t send any Thank You notes. This one sounds horrible, I know. It’s not that we don’t appreciate it. It’s just that we simply can’t prioritize it. Spending an hour or so after a birthday party writing out thank you notes or, better yet, getting my 5-year old daughter to do it, feels unachievable with two crying babies demanding full attention. So we just don’t do it. Thus far our friends are still our friends, so it appears we haven’t killed off all our relationships.
With the additional two children my fear of death has increased significantly. I never counted on this one. I’ve always had a little anxiety over death (well, actually, not so much over death itself but more around not having lived a full life before dying). I now am genuinely nervous about long work trips over oceans. Aches and pains feel more like cancer than ever before. Getting life insurance outside work has become a priority.
Half my bills that are not on automatic payment only get paid when a collection agency calls me. Yep, this makes me sound like a total degenerate. I’ve always taken pride in being fiscally responsible and having strong credit. (And I still do. My credit score remains super strong.) The deal is, when you get that first call from an agency, the bill hasn’t affected your credit one bit. I don’t seek this as a strategy, per se. But any bill that is not auto paid from my account just sits on my counter. I could prioritize them, but inevitably I don’t. Instead, I write stuff like this, have dinner with my wife, or sleep.
When we only had our girls, I used to look up kid friendly recipes and make things like homemade mac and cheese and fresh marinara. Sometimes they even wanted homemade mushroom soup. I was able to nourish their bellies and my soul at the same time. Yesterday’s dinner was a small jar of Kalamata olives, random slices of cheese, the last four fish sticks, and plain bagels served plain (we were out of butter).
Reading used to be a huge focus for us. We’d read books before bed every night, one daughter on each of our laps, a little fire going in the background during winter. We’d select some Boynton title like “Hippos Go Berserk!” from a nicely organized bookshelf and talk about all the pictures and what the characters were doing. It felt very Norman Rockwell, and I loved every minute of it. Fast forward to the last 18 months. I’ve read a book to my boys maybe five times in a year and a half. And when I do, it’s as they’re wriggling out of my arms, practically begging me to put them in bed and get it over with. Books are randomly distributed on shelves and on the floor, and probably alongside a dirty pee diaper that never quite made it to the trash. You can sit on the couch if you want, but you’ll need to move the crusty, half eaten Easy Mac that might be from yesterday.
On that note, the mess – the sheer volume of stuff – has increased by an order of magnitude. Ensuring the floor is not absolutely littered with ankle spraining little toddler IEDs is a full time job. I strolled over to my living room just now to take an inventory of the floor: one Little Mermaid nightgown, one dirty kitchen towel, three socks, a few books, one soiled pee diaper, a lumbar support pillow for your car, lots of other little trinkets, and, because why not, a maraca. Tip-top shape as usual.
Before we had kids, Lori and I used to go to a movie every weekend. After our first daughter Delaney was born we pretty much stopped that (totally normal), but we did still watch TV shows like Dexter, Homeland, and a few others. When Mia came we had to cut down our binge watching to no more than about two or three series per year. I remember watching Breaking Bad when she was only a few weeks old, trying to settle her as we were swept deeper and deeper into the world of Walter White. Things have changed. Since our twins were born I’ve seen about five TV shows to completion. And I mean episodes, not series; I’ve completed about five one-hour episodes of one show or another in 18 months.
When we had two kids, both were in full-time daycare and we had some core family and friends helping us through some tough spots. With our twins, our village was born several months into my wife’s pregnancy, long before they even arrived. At this point I’d guess that over 150 friends and family have helped us in some way over the past two years. With more children comes the need for a LOT more help, whether you know it or not. I have so much to say here, I’ll dedicate a future post to the topic of our village.
I could go on and enumerate more differences like nap schedules (there are none), food budget (crushing), and our somewhat unhealthy reliance on television, but my message would remain the same: life is different now with four. It’s much, much harder, and some days it feels impossibly hard. The astonishing fact, though, is that no matter how much we’ve sacrificed as parents of four, somehow we still feel like it’s all worth it. I don’t want more kids but I also wouldn’t want a life without our four little creations. How is that possible? How can it be that we’ve taken this much abuse and can say, like almost all parents would, that we wouldn’t have it any other way? Because, of course, the scroll of liberty lost represents only one side of the ledger. The other side has its highlights too and fortunately for the future of the human race, we tend to remember those with more permanence. Those memories are the ones that tell us to just hang in there, that as they grow up, little by little, it gets easier, and that it goes way too fast anyway so we had better pay attention.
So we try hard to be present, even when we just want to yell and swear and break something. Because five minutes after a downright biblical tantrum over the denial of a Ring Pop comes a moment when all four have the giggles and simply cannot stop. It’s a frenzy of laughter so perfect that, for once, I give it the respect it deserves and don’t reach for my iPhone to try to capture it. Instead I just sit back and watch, completely forgetting all the tantrums, the half done toenails, the catastrophic mess, pooping as a team sport, and the multitude of other daily challenges. I’m lost in this moment, as I should be, and everything else just melts away.