With the birth of each of my three babies there were different things that I learned immediately and along the way. But I don’t wish that I would have known them before hand because there was no way to know beforehand. There is just simply no way of being prepared for first becoming a mother and then becoming a mother of two or more. Between books, blogs, family members, neighbors and friends I bet I did actually hear it all. I think I heard the good, the bad and the ugly. But until I experienced it myself they were just stories-other people’s stories. Before I had a child it was easy to think, “no, that won’t happen to me, I won’t feel that way, I’ll be okay…” It was easy to reject anything that didn’t fit the image that I had in my head about the love and joy that I would experience having children. What I do know to be true now is that we all have our own story.

With my first baby I never dreamed that I would have such trouble breast feeding and that I would feel like such a failure wondering what was wrong with me. I also didn’t know that I would have it in me to pump six to eight times per day for six months. No one could have told me that I would have had that in me because it would have seemed like such an enormous task and I wouldn’t have believed that I could do it.

With my second baby, no one could have prepared me for the overwhelming emotion I would feel when I would look at my first, starting from when she came to visit in the hospital. I felt like our special bond and time was all of a sudden consumed by this new bundle of joy and I knew in my heart our time together would never be the same again. I wanted to hold her tight, I wanted to reassure her that I still loved her the same and I sometimes wanted to say sorry for the disruption of our simple, beautiful life.

When the third came along, I would never have been convinced by anyone that life would feel quite as crazy and chaotic as it did. I would have rejected the notion that I would feel in over my head and at times down right scared. I wanted the third from the depth of my soul, I felt a calling to have him. Yet, when he came I struggled to manage it all. Three kids under five proved to be messy, frustrating and more challenging than I had heard. I always heard “the third is easy, you will just go with the flow and so will they….” Well, not for me, I haven’t found much that is easy about parenting.

So, there you have it. I don’t wish that I would have known anything before having these three beautiful blessings because nothing could have prepared me for our story. I am content in knowing that as they keep growing there will be new challenges along the way and still I will wait until those challenges come to see how our story continues to unfold.