Adding to the Family

Adding another family member is always a momentous decision. And sometimes, the members most affected aren’t given any vote in the matter. 

Telling your children that there is a new sibling on the way can be a little precarious for parents. You wonder if making a big deal will be fun, or will make the older child resentful. 

Thankfully, our kids have had nothing but excitement for the arrival of younger siblings, which is a good thing at the rate we’re adding to our crew. When our second was born, our son was only 19 months old, so there was no explanation necessary and we believe that within a couple of weeks after our daughter’s birth he probably didn’t remember that she was ever not there. 

Since then, giving our kids the big news has only been fun and funny. When we told our kids that our now one-year-old daughter was due to make an appearance, my then 3-year-old daughter one-upped me by first announcing that she, too, had a baby in her tummy and then deciding that a baby was nothing to the real Tinkerbell taking up residence in her belly button. Two years later, we still hear tales of Tinkerbell’s tummy antics. 

As we drew closer to the due date, my kids debated the baby’s gender as if they could, by sheer passion, each get their wish for a boy or a girl. We wondered if it might have been wise to find out this big secret, if only to cut down on the gender wars at the dinner table. They agreed on one aspect, however. If the baby was a girl, her name was to be Pinkalicious, and if the baby was a boy, his name would be Eyeballs. 

When our daughter was born, my husband met the kids in the hall to let them know the news. My son’s disappointment in the hallway melted into adoration the second he saw his baby sister and later I overheard him say to his dad after we’d been home a few weeks that he didn’t care about gender anymore for future babies because our daughter, as he put it, “just fell into his love.” 

After witnessing a healthy heartbeat on the ultrasound at about eight weeks, we took our kids out to dinner to tell them the news about our new addition, due in December. There were cheers all around, and the next morning I saw that a new message had appeared on our dry-erase board in the kitchen in my six-year-old’s scrawl: “Hey guys! We’re going to have a new baby!” 

Our kids fight like all normal siblings, and I often chuckle as my one-year-old starts swatting the air before her overly-adoring older brother even comes near to kiss her. We are sure to have some bumps along the way as we add a sixth person to our household and change up the personality chemistry in our home. 

We feel thankful, however, that so far our kids have not perceived new siblings as competition or felt threatened by giving up their role as the baby. We have enough problems getting everybody to share nicely and wait their turn for the bathroom, but it’s nice to know that optimism and excitement reign as we prepare for the arrival of a new family member.