Whoops - should be “whether people are eager to have children”
No, weird age gap they’re 2 and 5 right now. Chasing an active toddler while not getting enough sleep is much harder than not getting enough sleep with a baby. The baby just lays there and poops itself so if you fall asleep for a few minutes watching it no bit deal the toddler takes the 30 second nap as an opportunity to climb the bookshelf. As for looking like it’s going to get worse for us. My eldest is going to a different school than the youngest for the first time and they’re 30 minutes apart so lots more car time for me to get everyone where they are supposed to be plus the eldest wants to do ballet next year so on top of an extra hour a day in the car instead of plopping them in front of the TV at 330 so I can keep working I’ll have to work on my phone from ballet class and my work day will probably be under 6 hours of effective time which means more working on weekends and even less relaxing time.
Partially because it’s what people do. You get a job, get married and then have kids. Like going to college it was never an option for me to not have kids or go to college. I also like teenagers and even middle schoolers are ok so it’ll be better once we make it through the first dozen years so this baby crap is just a shitpile you have to get through to get to the good stuff.
I thought I’d like the ‘kid’ ages when they can do stuff and talk to you, and the baby stage would just be something to get through, but I’m actually really enjoying it. Toddlers look hard, though.
Can your partner not help?
Not really. I am fortunate to own two business, work from home, and set my own hours while my wife works long hours a 30 minute commute away. She either can help for an hour in the mornings or come home an hour earlier. We’ve recently swapped from the morning help to the evenings so we can stop eating dinner at 7 pm with a 730 bedtime.
Once they become able to move on their own life gets harder, their ability to move vastly out paces their ability to reason or at least did for my kids. My two year old figured out child locks at 1.5 and door knobs just before 2. Now she wakes up in the middle of the night a prowl the house and goes wherever she wants, we get less sleep then we did when she was a new born. One of her favorite targets is her sister then we have two tired kids. Her teachers have recommended getting a deadbolt and locking her in her room at night but I have safety concerns about that. The five year old is starting to have things to talk about thought which kid in her kindergarten class is marrying who gets old after 5 minutes or the 50th day in a row so that’s a banned topic now. Learning to read rather than be read to is pretty cool same with her learning mathematics and history and geography.
My sister was thinking of getting something like this to contain her 2.5 year old:
We’re lucky because our new house has doors with very high up latches. The baby can pull open the doors already, but it’ll be a few years before she’s tall enough to reach the latch.
Never mind, soon it’ll all be about ballet. 
Five is quite early to be reading, isn’t it? They seem to be starting very young these days.
That is a potentially deadly safety risk. Don’t do it for any reason.
Call a local firehouse and ask a firefighter what they think about that idea.
We’ve got three of them. It takes her a couple of tries to do it but she can get them open.
“Unfortunately”, both my daughters are 99th percentile so the 2 year old is well over 3 feet tall the doorknobs would have to be crazy tall to be out of her reach which makes counter hard too. Ours are 38" and she can get 6" back on them.
Again, “unfortunately”, our kid’s are very smart. The 5 year old was starting to read at 4.5 when COVID hit and she was set back about 9 months due to our poor homeschooling. She’s the youngest kid in her kindergarten class but at the top academically. They’ve started her on multiplication. Her school is good and they expect everyone to be reading by the end of kindergarten ( I didn’t learn until half way through 1st) but she’s about 6 months ahead of her peers.
This also is part of the problem with the 2 year old. Her favorite teacher went on lunch break before Thanksgiving break and she figured out how to open the classroom door and sneak through the school to the teachers lounge and get in there so she could be with the teacher. They have now just moved to a policy where they keep her with the teacher at all times so she doesn’t wander unattended. Earlier in the year she broke into a 6th grade classroom while on one of her escape attempts and by now all of the teachers are on permanent lookout for her.
Ya, no kidding. One of the many hats I wear is as a fire protection engineer, we’ll deal with another year of lack of sleep until she ages out of this.
Oh wow. I remember my sister still being under a metre aged 5 or 6. I don’t have a tape measure handy but the latches are just 3 or 4 inches below my shoulder height, so hopefully it’ll be a while before she can reach. My partner is tall though… It really is a problem kids getting big enough to get into stuff before they are old enough to know what they’re doing.
Hope you keep your front door locked! They sound like a right handful. Hopefully it’ll get easier as they grow up and understand more.
That lasts til they are 48.
Thank you. I was searching for words.
And yes, I thought people might misunderstand me like that, leading to the idea that I was being not truthful / disingenuous. It really did seem trivial to me, and clearly I was lucky with my kid and my situation, but also being sleepless, changing my life, being tied down to a baby – those never seemed like ‘sacrifices’ I wanted to be a sleepless person who had to give up his freedom and spontaneity, which I guess is why giving up those things was so small.
I didn’t just want to have a smart beautiful baby - I wanted to be a parent, staying up all night for a demanding, ungrateful and unrepentant child.
I have no way of knowing how a 2nd would work out, but I’d take the risk in a heartbeat.
I just realized I may have worded that poorly - I didn’t mean that I disagreed with the idea that it was worth it ( it was).
Or maybe your pediatrician. Who might be more worried about a two year old who can open doors exploring the house unsupervised getting into who knows what or possibly getting outside, than the second of undoing an eye hook (does the job as well as a deadbolt) in case of fire.
But there are gates that usually work which allow the child to see out.
Not quite understanding the fire safety concern. Safety concern that the child cannot get out alone? The child getting out alone is the problem! If the door handle prevents it like it does for many then the kid is as theoretically stuck in there in case of fire and our inability to get to them as with a deadbolt lock. Unable to open door is unable to open door. In case of fire actually though the last thing I want is to get to that room and have the kid not be there, to be running around the house trying to find my two year old who may or may not be outside somewhere or maybe hiding under something scared. Somewhere in the house but who knows where! And I don’t know.
Better yet though is sleep training so it is less of a concern. Something definitely worth discussing with your child’s doctor to discuss the various options of approaches.
Just to add - locking the outside doors is an important but by itself not adequate layer. An extra lock high on the door where the child cannot reach it. Windows locked. Child proofing is in fact not possible (we can slow them down but not proof it) but if the kid wanders out of room at night extra levels of caution are required.
Some opt for an internal door alarm on the kid’s bedroom door.
If you have a pool of course always secure access to it but if the kid is missing FIRST place you look is there. And in the bathrooms.
We used to hang a toy on the outside of the kid’s door, which would loudly clatter when the door opened - cheap but effective
This is a really good point and its certainly getting me to rethink my position. I’ll talk it over with my wife tonight and get her opinion. Thanks.
Our outside doors are sealed at night mostly as a weatherproof measure and the only door she could open leads to our yard so there is no real concern there. Even if she made it outside the yard she’s got another good hike to get to anything like a road. So far our primary concern at night is she either is climbing in bed with us or her sister to talk and play or she raids the pantry and we’ve caught her climbing it a couple of times to get the the goodies we put on higher shelves to keep away from the children. One morning she decided she wanted instant oatmeal so she opened every pack to find some that was already cooked and dumped the “wrong” ones on the floor. That was a giant mess to wake up to.
We did sleep training with both kids the eldest went great and she is a championship sleeper. It never took with the youngest not sure what’s different there. Even minor changes like moving her nap to school resulted in months of them fighting her to get her to not just scream for 3 hours and wake up the other kids. The school finally won that one by having the principle spend 2 hours a day holding her in his office while she slept on his chest so all the teachers could do their jobs and then spending 2 months slowly transferring her sleeping on him in different rooms until she was sleeping in the classroom then on her cot with him next to her and then she got 3 weeks off for Thanksgiving and she completely reset hopefully she’ll get back in the groove quicker this time.
And a great example of something that’s easier with 1 kid than 2. In fact in general, sleep problems with 1 kid are survivable, in that you might be dog tired the next day but at least you only have that kid to cope with. Whereas if one of your kids is a bad enough sleeper to disturb the other(s), you then have 2 or more grumpy kids the next day to try and manage in a sleep-deprived fashion.
We are so lucky to have 2 mostly good sleepers - and with a relatively big age gap (5 years), we’ve found that when the younger one does cry out in the night, the older one usually sleeps through it. It was more challenging to sleep-train the little one though, in that some form of ‘controlled crying’/self-soothing is our preferred method, and sometimes that isn’t fair to inflict on the older one.
Reading these responses has reaffirmed our decision to remain one and done. The initial adjustment from 0 to 1 was very difficult, because you think you know what tired feels like but you don’t know. I mean, some people know. Med students probably know. But I got a total of five hours of sleep in the four days I was in the hospital for the birth of our son and it damned near killed me. I was acutely suicidal for a few days there. And to go from that to even more sleeplessness in perpetuity is very difficult. People tell you it’s going to get better with time, but the future is not really something you can conceptualize when you are that sleep deprived.
The things I thought would be hard were not the things that turned out to be hard. I thought diaper changes and spit up would be hard. You get over that by like the third day. Finding childcare is what’s hard. Especially during a pandemic where my husband and I have to be on 24/7. There’s no running the kid to Grandpa’s house or having a babysitter come over so we can go on a date. It’s all Wee Weasel all the time.
But somehow we got a unicorn baby who started sleeping 12 hours a night at six weeks old (and still does at ten months.) He’s friendly, he’s chill, he is a baby on “easy” mode without question. As far as his parents are concerned, he’s perfect. There is no way we’re getting that lucky again. No way.
Right now, we still have free time, a little bit of extra money, and most importantly, sanity.
The eye hook idea sounds a lot better (and cheaper! and easier!) than an actual deadbolt. A deadbolt has a key, doesn’t it? Which you wouldn’t want to be faffing round with in an emergency situation. An eye hook at doorknob level is also immediately obvious to any external people (like a firefighter) who might ever need to be bringing all four family members to safety at the same time
Wow, you’re lucky. My baby started waking up 6 or 7 times a night at 4 months old and never stopped. We ought to do sleep training, but it seems so harsh and stressful so I keep putting it off. At least we haven’t had to worry about childcare yet. Even if we wanted a date night, there’s nowhere to go.