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Parents who have more than two children, what was the transition from two to three like?
My wife and I have two kids, 3 and 1. We’ve talked about the possibility of adding another kid into the mix, but have gone back and forth.
What was your main experience going from 2-3? Pros, cons, everything in between!
Three here, and yep I'm pretty exhausted. Hitting this number is a double edge sword. On the one hand, you're going to be tired; you're not going to have much personal time for hobbies, etc; you'll sometimes be too busy to even stop and appreciate the special times you have with your spouse or any individual kid. On the other hand, at least for me, three is the time when you stop feeling like "I'm a terrible parent and I have no idea what I'm doing", and instead you start to confidently feel like an experienced parent and you no longer get pushed around by kids emotions or fazed by situations that were scary the first time. But the exhaustion is real.
When I need a reality check, however, I remember a family who lived across the street from me as a kid: they had 13 kids. One thing I remember about that house was that there were roles and responsibilities, there were black and white expectations, there were consequences, and there were no excuses. I started thinking more about how they managed to keep their household running smoothly once I got to three kids.
What is the age difference between your kids, and how old are they now?
My youngest is three and the oldest is 11 years older.
I'm about five years ahead; I find that I am a lot less tired now than I used to be, and have gotten back into hobbies that I had once abandoned, and it is refreshing to get back to it, and even to share those with the kids.
(but also parenthood is so different from person to person, and I make no claims that this is universal)
I think my reprieve will be when the now-14-year-old goes to college. Until then, I’ll still be climbing up the mountain because the now-3-year-old will be adding more and more activities for the next few years and that means constantly driving three different kids in three different directions all the time. Someday I’ll get those hobbies back!
We put a fair amount of effort into trying to coordinate lessons for the kids, and it is a life saver.
For example, my son likes ball hockey, and one of my daughters likes archery, so we looked at all the options, until we found them at the same rec centre on the same morning. All my kids take piano lessons, so we figured out a day where there's a large block and got them all in a row.
It doesn't always work out - we drive around town so much still - but even spending a couple of hours looking at all the programs has saved us dozens of hours on Saturday mornings. We also found that sometimes it's better to go a bit farther for lessons if they line up; if my kids are in hockey and archery at the same time, but the ride is 15 minutes longer, that's still better than driving one then driving the other, even if it's close, because all the accompanying getting ready time is grouped up.
Mine was jarring as our third came ten years after the second. Our third is spoiled damn rotten by their big siblings. My wife and I just don’t have the energy that we used to have. Sorry, I know my experience isn’t exactly what you’re asking for. I will say though, our neighbors across the street have three under three and I’ve never seen such tired people.
For us, the transition from one to two kids was more extreme then two to three, as that's when we had to figure out switching attention from one little person to multiple little people. The age difference between my kids is larger than most other people I'm friends with; my kids are 17, 12, 8 right now. That meant that we never had more than one kid in diapers, which was great.
There are some practical things that we had to figure out, but they're pretty easy to figure out. Mostly I mean logistical things, like activities that require one hand per child, such as crossing the street which is not really an issue now, but we would have to walk in a train formation sometimes. Our house has 50% more kids related mess than it would otherwise have, and we spend 50% more kids related money on things, and the expense issue is very real. I don't love morning school dropoff because every kid is currently in a different school, and I am usually the one dropping them off at school.
All my kids are really different people with different ideas of fun, and I love that a lot. We were blessed with children that were all healthy, for which we are quite thankful. I enjoy having built in "playmates" (yes, I'm an enormous child at heart) for board game nights or road hockey.
Also, logistically, now that all three of our kids have activities it can be a little much coordinating getting them all to the right place and picked up.
Yes, many kids can be a logistical nightmare. We spend a fair amount of time planning extracurriculars to minimize trips; we'll spend an hour finagling lesson times to overlap, which can be hard when you're doing swim lessons across a big age gap.
We are on the cusp of our oldest being able to drive herself places, which is nice, and luckily my mom lives close by and is very involved; she does after school pickup for all the kids, and takes them to lessons a couple of times each week as well. Luckily piano lessons are all back-to-back-to-back for our kids, so that one at least is easy.
We're just about to have our third, so whilst I cannot give advice yet, I can share in your excitement / trepidation. Good luck OP!
I had a chance to ask this question to two different people. One with 3 kids and another with 5 (both men, not sure if it matters).
Guy with 3 kids: "Going from 0 kids to 1 was a gigantic change in our lives. Going from 1 to 2 was much less dramatic. From 2 to 3, we barely noticed a change".
Guy with 5 kids: "Biggest change was going from 0 to 1 and from 2 to 3". The reason he gave for the 2-to-3 change was: "because for the first time, your kids outnumber you and your spouse".
Not sure if this helps but there it is.
I know 4 families our age, with 3 to 6 kids each, they also said the same thing, that by the time the third is added, it didn't really faze them and what's one or two more by that point.
There's a british TV show about a family with 3 kids. It's called "Outnumbered". It's funny, and worth a watch.
For us, 1 to 2 was a big change because you had to learn to balance attention and divide and conquer.
2 to 3 was a much less drastic change, and is more about logistics. Our Forester barely fits two car seats and a booster; we need a bigger car. If someone is napping, that doesn't mean solo time with the other kid because now there are two, so you have to actively schedule 1:1 time with each kid. More activities; more dropoffs; more transportation.
Overall it doesn't feel any different than 2, just busier.
My advice is consider getting a minivan. We struggled too long with a third row; when they are small and unable to self buckle squeezing back there got old real fast.
We have one Odyssey and one CRV, and considering that you're often carrying around your own kids plus friends, the Odyssey comes in really handy. You do take a big hit on gas mileage vs a smaller vehicle though. For us, it's 30+ miles/gal for the CRV vs 20 miles/gal for the Odyssey.
When we broke down and bought a minivan my wife fell in love with the Odyssey... Kicking ourselves for not doing it sooner. But yeah, mpg isn't too pretty.
Getting a minivan with second row captain's seats and a bench in the back immediately ended all arguments about who gets a window seat and no more 'he's taking my space' arguments. I distinctly remember the first trip after getting rid of our car and how relaxing it was in comparison. FAR less stressful.
Contrary to some stereotypes, as a dad, I love our minivan. We have an Odyssey but want that new sienna hybrid. We are actually considering having both. My wife drops the kids off in the morning and I pick up in the afternoon. We have our 3rd due in a month and I have an older daughter from a previous marriage that visits during school breaks. The 3rd row and sliding doors are a lifesaver.
Preach. We haven't tried more than a 3 ish hour road trip but having that dvd player is key. When they are finally able to buckle themselves is also a great milestone.
Having 1 was huge. Going to 2 was about 80% as huge. Having #3 was a 10% change. Our lives had already pretty much changed to 'life revolves around the kids' by then so adding another didn't really change that much.
For the long term perspective, Im now remarried and have 3 more stepkids, but all 6 are adults now. It was a real uphill struggle for awhile but I love having 6 adult kids - probably would've driven me round the bend if I had them all as babies. And now there are 7 grandkids so we're turning into quite the little posse already. Its the greatest joy of my life to see them all. Grandkids are WAY more fun than my own - it's true, you can spoil them, sugar them up and send them home and let mom and dad deal with the tough stuff lol.
As others have said, 2->3 was nowhere near as big as an adjustment at 1->2, the only big adjustment is that now you are officially outnumbered lol. If all your kids are close in age, you will also for sure need to get a bigger car if they are all still in car seats or boosters, we have a new Explorer and it's like Tetris trying to get 2 boosters and a car seat to fit in the car safely, we definitely use the 3rd row constantly.
At least with my case, my oldest daughters (6 and 4) actually help watch the youngest daughter (18 months) when they are playing and such. It's definitely nice to have 2 extra sets of eyes to help keep her saf, but they obviously aren't the most reliable sets of eyes so you still have to be on alert.