So how are you adjusting to having two children?

People ask me this all the time.  Why wouldn’t they?  I’m curious too.  How am I adjusting? 

I (we) are pretty much constantly in survival mode. Feed children. Clean children.  Repeat.

But this is not what I tell people when they ask.  I normally focus on the positive, “It’s great.  It’s so much easier adjusting to having a newborn when it’s your 2nd”.  Which is true. 

What I don’t say is that when my children go to sleep I high-five myself in my mind for making it through another day and keeping them both alive.

Take something as simple as going to the grocery store.

Johnny and I went to the grocery store for the first time today together since Lucy was born.  I put Lucy in the baby Ergo (baby carrier) and Grace in the cart.  But I didn’t just “put” Grace in the cart, there’s always a tantrum, or , “that’s not the right cart”, or she wants to sit in, “the big part”.  But after all that…she was in the cart. We get into the store, and Johnny was all walking around like he had all the time in the world, moseying down each aisle. 

At one point he was comparing prices on all of the 400+ different types of coffee and I finally had to say to him, “Honey…you do not realize that I have a 14 pound human time bomb strapped to my chest, and we have a 29 pound grenade bouncing around in our cart, pulling cans of beans and corn that we do not need off the shelves. Get your coffee…and we have to get out of here.”

Normally when I go to the grocery store with both the girls it’s like some covert-secret-military-operations- crap.  Get in, get out.  With as few casualties as possible.  We don’t have time to “look at ingredients”, or  “go back to that other aisle”.  WE are on a Mission. 

Johnny didn’t know.  Why would he? (it was his first assignment;).  It’s the "little stuff" that is really actually big stuff, that takes getting used to. Not that one child is easy.  But I would go ahead and say that two is twice as hard.