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After having your first baby one of the questions you hear a lot is – are you thinking of having another? For some people the idea of having another hasn’t even crossed their minds, they are still getting used to life as a parent of one and enjoying their beautiful little bundle. For me I knew I wanted to have two babies close together. It took a while to get pregnant the first time so after having Millie in March 2017 we decided to just go with the flow. I ended up falling pregnant in June 2017 – yes that’s right, Millie was just 3 months! Oscar was born early April 2018, with just under 13 months between them.
Having my babies so close together was the best decision I have ever made, don’t get me wrong there are times where its incredibly hard but those times are easily overridden by all the amazing moments in between. For anyone wondering whether having babies close together is for them or for anyone who got pregnant closer to their first than they had initially planned, here’s a few things I learned along the way….
People think you are either irresponsible or insane! I lost count of the times I got asked – so was this an accident? Nobody could believe that I would choose to have babies so close together. Not the doctor that I saw to register my pregnancy, not the midwives at the hospital, not my friends or even some of my family.
You start to worry about a lot of things that you know there is no point worrying about but you are pregnant and hormonal so you do anyway. Omg what if its twins?! What if I have to have an emergency section and Millie can’t walk yet – how would I cope? What if I don’t love him/her the same? How is it even possible to love another baby as much as I love my first?
Once your bump starts to show and you are going about your business, baby and bump in tow, that’s when you start to get – oh wow you are going to have your hands full. Probably the most unhelpful comment you can ever hear – ok great thanks for reminding me how hard it’s going to be and offering no advice what so ever.
When it comes to planning your birth the main thing on your mind is your first baby – who’s going to look after them whilst you are in labour? How long will you have to be away from them? How are they going to react to you bringing home another tiny human? If I’m being honest I didn’t even process that I was having another baby until I was about to push him out! In that moment every emotion that I should have had over the last 9 months hit me at once and I started to cry, a happy cry because I was about to meet my beautiful baby boy.
He arrived and just like with Millie I couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. This time it was different though – the first time you have no idea what being a parent is like so it feels natural to learn about your new-born as you go. With Oscar I felt like I should already know what I was doing, but I was so wrong. He couldn’t have been more polar opposite to Millie from the second he came in to the world – once again I was starting from scratch.
I got home and I was so excited to see my baby girl, yet so nervous to introduce her to her new baby brother. I built it up to be this major event in my head. We bought her a present on our way home, a present that was from Oscar to say hey please love me. I had read online that its better for the dad to walk in with the new sibling so that the elder sibling doesn’t feel like their mum has been stolen. After walking in to the house to probably around 10 weeks later it all became a blur of emotion driven by hormones and sleep deprivation. I was so overwhelmed with happiness seeing my two babies together. Millie was suddenly a toddler compared to this tiny little human I’d brought home. I felt guilty every second of the day and I cried a lot – happy tears and sad tears. Millie had tantrums and Oscar cried way more than I ever remember Millie doing. I felt like I didn’t love Oscar as much as I loved Millie – but then I was comparing a love that had grown for a year to a love that was just budding. The thing I’ve learned now is that the reality of it is that maybe they won’t love their new baby brother or sister at first but they will, no matter what you do they will love each other. Maybe you don’t feel like you love your new baby as much as your older one, but you will.
I’m not sure exactly when but a few months in Millie stopped having tantrums, she started kissing Oscar on the head every time she passed him, she went to put his dummy in when he started to cry. He started to smile and Millie would jump around and sing to him to try and get him to smile. Millie’s speech came on in leaps and bounds and she started to refer to him as ‘my brother’. He got old enough and strong enough to go in the baby walker and she would push him around the house singing ‘pushing my brother round and round’. He started to giggle and they would roll around on the floor together laughing. Now Oscar is 6 months old and Millie is just 19 months, every morning Millie gets up and goes to look for Oscar to shout his name in excitement and give him a big kiss and a cuddle. They play chase whilst Oscar is in his walker and they belly laugh at each other doing silly things and making silly noises. They are the best of friends.
All those tears, all the guilt and all the worry – they don’t even come close to the happiness. When people see me now with two babies in tow they still say the same thing they did when I was pregnant – oh wow you have your hands full. The difference is that now I know…yes, my hands are full but there isn’t anything in the world as full as my heart is.
