futurepastorswife has asked for an explanation of my comment in the previous entry about two kids being more than twice as busy as one... the reason it seems like more than just double the workload is that not only do you have the separate needs of two individual children to meet, you also have carry out those and other responsibilities in such a way that, well, both kids end up alive and well at the end of the day. I can't just up and go to the bathroom like I used to be able to do, leaving Susanna to play by herself for a minute - now I have to make sure before I go anywhere that Jacob is in a place where she can't sit on him, bite him or otherwise torment him while I'm out of the room. And that goes for anything I do that involves moving out of eyesight. And sometimes it's impossible to meet the needs of both kids at once - human beings were only given one set of hands! Add to that the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn (and the fact that my toddler only takes one nap a day, so I have to choose between sleeping then or taking care of the myriad of other responsibilities that are calling my name... and sleep almost always wins out against cleaning or cooking duties!), and caring for a toddler who is in to everything and regularly testing the limits becomes very hard to do in a patient and gracious manner... my temper flares up a lot more easily these days, and I've had to apologize more than once to Susanna for disciplining her in anger rather than in love...

All that said, I am not here to complain about the responsibilities I've been given to care for these two precious children... I was talking with another young mother of two in the nursing room at church yesterday about how easy it is to dwell on thoughts of "if I can just make it through this stage...": "If I can just make it till he sleeps through the night...", "If I can just get these kids out of diapers...", "If I can just survive their teenage years..." (we're not there yet, but that day will be here before we know it!). But not only do you end up despairing because every stage of life and childrearing has its specific difficulties (they sleep through the night only to want to be entertained all day long) - the day will never come (until heaven) when you will ever stop wishing away some hardship! - you also end up focusing so much on the negative aspects of the stage you're in and miss all the joys of that same stage... If all I ever think about right now is getting a full night's sleep, it will be hard for me to enjoy these precious weeks of having a child so helpless and needy that all he wants to do is be held and fed and stare at our faces - they learn to do a few things on their own and suddenly your lap is not quite the inviting place it used to be! Or for this other mother, it's that she doesn't ever get to sit in on the sermon because her son doesn't do well in the nursery (and we have so many small kids at our church that the nursery workers can't spend the whole service trying to quiet one screaming child while the others wreak havoc on each other!), but as she commented, Sunday morning in the nursing room is the one time of the week that she can give her second child an hour of her undivided attention, and those opportunities are few and far between with multiple small kids in the house! So her husband takes sermon notes for her and her son gets some special mommy time.

All that to say that yes, two kids is busy, busy, busy... but I wouldn't trade these two little gifts for all the "me time" in the world! May we always seek God's grace to be thankful for all the small blessings He gives us even in the midst of difficult circumstances, because not only does He deserve all our thanks, but a thankful and joyful attitude can make even the most trying days of life easier to bear!

I have more that I want to say about things I've been learning over the past few days, things that I might not be learning if life weren't so busy and sleep so rare, but I'll save it for the next post because this one is getting long.