Anyone who knows this blog well will remember how much we struggled trying to conceive. In my younger years I was told it would never happen.
When our first came along we were over the moon and honestly believed it was a freak occurrence. We had a little boy. We never expected to get that lucky again. But we did. We had a little girl.
Of course we were delighted, but because we had not been planning for it – heck, not even expecting it was possible – we were caught out.
Adapting for baby number two wasn’t something we had factored in to our long term plans, and although we had a good 6 months to prepare once everything was confirmed and looked positive, we still felt as though we were chasing our tales.
But that was nothing compared to how we had to adapt when she actually arrived. Parents of single children, you may think you understand the chaos of having children, but you don’t. You only understand the chaos of having child. When you have two of them to keep clean, clothed, fed, etc., it’s a whole different ball game.
In an effort to make your journey into becoming parents for a second time a little easier than ours was, here are a few personal thoughts and truths from me.
The Sleep Situation
You already know that your own sleep is going to be interrupted. A lot.
However, this time around you also have someone else to think about – your first born.
Mine had just started school when his little sister was born, so we had a morning routine that we couldn’t be flexible with, and a little boy who needed his sleep if he was going to make it through the day.
The issue is, babies cry a lot, and they do it loud. So now you have the sleep deprivation, the mild depression and sense of dread that comes with it, and as a bonus, you also panic that baby number 2 is going to wake up baby number 1! So there is an urgency to wake ups, and when it comes to sleep training (if that’s the route you take), you have to do it during half term or the summer holidays, provided that fits in with where baby number 2 is at, and they aren’t teething, or ill, or going through a sleep regression – which they always are.
If it is possible to keep the two kids far away from each other at night then do it, although for most of us, our houses aren’t big enough for that.
You Can’t Meet Everyone’s Needs Anymore
With one child, you can sort of still meet everyone’s needs. With two, it’s just not going to happen. Not in the first year or two anyway. Sorry.
You need to adapt your expectations here, and so does your other half, because there will be fewer moments to be a couple, fewer moments where you get your own time, or a complete break.
You won’t be able to be at the beck and call of your first child anymore either. They want juice? They’ll have to wait, you’re feeding. They are trying to show you a picture they are proud of? You’ll take a look once you’ve stopped the baby crawling dangerously close to the edge of the stairs. They have their foot stuck in their chest of drawers upstairs? You’ll be there as soon as you have finished changing this already opened poonami of a nappy. That one’s a true story…
It works the other way too. I once had to leave my daughter screaming her lungs out in her cot because my eldest had thrown up in his bed. My fella was away so it was just me, and I couldn’t clean up sicky bedsheets while holding a 9 months old. So I put her somewhere safe and came back for her when the bed was changed.
You can’t met everyone’s needs all of the time anymore. It’s impossible.
You Will Love Your Children Differently
I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s true. I don’t know if it’s just a boy/girl thing or what, but I love my two differently.
To be clear, I’m not saying I have a favourite or that I love one more than the other. That’s absolutely not what I mean, I love them both to death. But the way I interact with them both is different. The way that love comes across is different.
There are a lot of factors at play here so nailing down the why is practically impossible. One is a boy and one is a girl, one is obviously much older than the other, they have different personalities, I am more experienced as a parent for number two, our living situation was different for number two, and on and on it goes.
It’s probably a combination of all of these things, but whatever the reason, you won’t have the same relationship with your second as you had with your first.
When I realised this I was initially anxious I was failing in some way, but that’s not what is happening at all. You are simply reacting to a different person, in a different time, as who you are now, not who you were then.
Making Time For Both Children
When you only have one child, you don’t need to make time for them, because all of your time is theirs. It’s a massive shift for them when baby number two comes along.
Our son loved his little sister so much, but he also had real struggles with his new place in the family. All of a sudden, he had to share he Mum and Dad with someone else, and babies need a lot of attention so the split was rarely even.
This can manifest in all sorts of different ways, especially if your first is still young, because they don’t have the emotional maturity to understand what they are feeling. For us, it came out as bad behaviour, and even he odd bit of occasional mean behaviour towards his sister.
He was jealous, he felt pushed out, and he felt like it was unfair. So he acted up, caused problems, deliberately made noise during his sister’s nap time or interrupted us when I was feeding her. It caused arguments, tellings off, and consequences for behaviours that were not acceptable.
Then one day, with me and my fella both exasperated, our beautiful little boy broke down into tears and told us he felt like we loved his sister more than him. It was heart breaking 💔😭 He cried, I cried, my daughter cried (I think she was just joining in with the noise). We had a big talk and tried to make him understand that a baby’s needs are different to a 5 year old’s, and that it wouldn’t be this way forever.
It’s not like we hadn’t been aware of this. We had tried to give him extra attention when we could, we never missed anything at school, we made a fuss of him when he did something well, we made sure that weekends were about family time where he got to pick somewhere to go or something to do etc. But things had changed. We couldn’t make his life feel like it did before. Because it wasn’t. We changed his life forever with the arrival of his little sister, and now we had to help him adapt to baby number two as much as we had to.
It’s fine now. They have a lovely relationship. But that first 6 months was really tough on him, and on us.
We’re Still Adapting
You don’t ever really finish adapting to baby number two. Just when you think you’ve found your feet, someone changes, grows, regresses, or throws up on something important. The chaos doesn’t disappear, it just becomes more familiar.
What does change is your tolerance for it. You stop expecting things to feel fair all the time. You stop apologising to yourself for not being everything to everyone in every moment. You realise that sometimes, choosing the least-wrong option is the best you can do, and that most things can be fixed later with a cuddle and an apology.
If you’re about to have your second, or you’re already in that foggy first year wondering why this feels harder than you thought it would, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just doing something genuinely difficult, with more people involved and fewer hands than you need.
We’re still adapting a few years in. Probably always will be. But that’s family. Our house is chaos and our days are full, but our hearts are so much fuller as a family of four 👨👩👧👦💖