What's the difference?

Now that I'm a mother to four, one of the most frequently asked questions is "How was going from two to four over night?". Basically, my answer is not that bad. For me, making the jump from 1-2 was much, much more difficult. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons for that. Both boys had a lot of therapy at the time. Trevor was dealing with health issues back then. It was our first adoption. The big reason that was such a tough time though was because they were both babies. T was not quite 2.5 when E came home at age 1. It was a lot of diapers and I didn't even feel like I could go outside without help -- one would take off in one direction and the other in another and neither was old enough to understand and follow directions. Rough. Now with the three boys being of the age where they are at least semi-independent, its much less demanding.


Don't get me wrong, there have been the fair share of changes....

For one, we clearly have less brain cells now. While we seem to have full knowledge of the fact that the entire family no longer fits into the Civic, we simply can't seem to get it into our minds that one parent AND the three boys with car seats also does not work. Civic's are small. I love them (but I digress), but even though the back seat technically holds seat belts for three, there is just no way on earth you can actually get three car seats in there. It's been over nine months since we've been a family of six and STILL just last week I was literally walking out the door with K leaving my husband with the Civic to take the three boys to the dentist. I think probably, at this point, we'll just keep forgetting until next year when T isn't required by law to be in a car seat and then it will work.

Another major difference is reflected in this blogs title. We may have added two kids but the volume in our house went up about ten fold at least. It's not even fighting noise. Its just the sound of that many small children making car noises and jumping and laughing and talking. Its just really, really loud. Thus, so has the Advil intake increased ten fold...

Perhaps the most notable difference is the laundry and the food situation. It's amazing. Pretty much at any given time in this house I could stand to do laundry or am in the process of doing laundry. It's constant. Food? How does the math work that we add one baby and one 5 year old and the food needed doubles? Its actually amazing to me the sheer quantity of food we go through in this house. After the amazement wears off then the panic sets in. If I spend this much on food NOW and they are 5 & 6 then how on earth will I keep them in food when they are teens? No joke, most recently embarrassing moment: going grocery shopping and having the check-out person say she's calling for a second cart and help out to the car because she's not a clue how I fit all this in one cart. The real kicker of the situation is that we'd already made a Costco run that week so my overflowing cart didn't even have the big items like the 4 gallons of milk etc.


Luckily for me, its the cleaning part I hate, and the cleaning hasn't really changed. The same house doesn't seem to get any messier or cleaner than before.... in other words, its always been this messy, now I just have more excuses as to why!