As I’ve been really busy prioritizing my limited work hours as needed (friends, I still cannot take myself out of partial maternity leave and am working on a pretty reduced schedule!), new content for this blog has taken a back burner in it’s physical form– but I have definitely been writing posts for you in my head! And I’m really excited to share this one!

We are 4 months in to being a family of 5.  I shared some initial feelings early on in this post about what we had learned at that point, and that all still really rings true for us- check that post out first if you didn’t catch it the first time!  But today, I’m talking more about our family unit of 5 vs specifically the 3 kids, and quite honestly, what I’m going to share has come as a complete surprise to me.  The first part of it isn’t a surprise… the biggest change during this transition has been our time.  But I don’t mean just that we have less of it for each kid, or less for just the two of us, even though that is all true.  The literal division of time has been the biggest change for us.

You see, ever since Michael and I started dating (9 years ago!), I have always been pretty protective of our time together.  I wasn’t like this in previous relationships, but with Michael something about our time together always felt so special and precious to me.  And we got to spend a lot of time together– we met at work and while I was teaching in a classroom away from him (obviously!), we served on a time consuming team together and before we were parents he helped in the background with my shows a fair amount, so we spent a lot of work time together too.  So when we had to be split up for whatever reason (activities with other people, extra things for work, etc)), I always found myself guarding the time I knew I had with him– I would always try to plan those other things at a time I knew he was busy anyways.  Maybe everyone does this, but it was definitely always a priority for me.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do those other things– especially getting together with my sweet girlfriends, or community theatre activities, etc.  It was just that I always felt like I wanted as much time with Michael as I could.  A couple and fellow pair of wedding photographers and educators I highly admire always say that one of their life goals is to maximize their time together on this earth in order to bear the most complete witness to each other’s life they can.  That is how I always felt about my time with Michael.  As we got married and became parents, this priority continued even though it admittedly became harder during certain stages of our life.

One such instance where we couldn’t control the change in our time together happened while I was on a year long maternity leave from teaching with our first son (before JGP!) and I will always remember the specific moment I realized it all.  Because I wasn’t teaching, we were spending a bit less time together during the work day than we had previously had sometimes working on those teams/etc.  And during that year, Michael got a huge promotion that moved him to another building in the district.  I was thrilled for him– it was his dream job.  But it also made me realize that when I returned, we would no longer be working “together”, and I knew it was highly likely that we never would again.  Enter wedding photography, and you know how that has turned out, likely out of this instinctive protection of our time together– Michael is my second shooter!  I will always say that while I love wedding photography more than I can say, I truly believe I would have less joy in it if he wasn’t the one regularly by my side while photographing, it is just so special to me!

Anyways, even with 2 young busy kids, 2 separate careers, and commutes to much of our work, I think I can count on about two hands the number of times we split up by choice on our time off (weekends, etc). Whether that means one of us goes somewhere without the kids, or we split up the kids and do different things, if we have the choice and one person isn’t busy with something specific, it was very rare that we did it.  We just like doing life together– even if more chaotic with 2 kids, even if it means my 1000th trip to Menards or his 4000th trip to Target…we like our time together.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with an approach to marriage and parenting that has a lot more split up time– it just has never been our approach (my introverted husband, if left to his complete own devices, might make some different scheduling decisions than I have! ;-)).

So that big transitional change for us, the division?  In the last 4 months, we have split up by choice more than in our previous 9 years together!  I will take the big kids to an event at school or errands while he stay’s with the baby, he takes them to Sunday school while I stay with baby, we split and run separate errands, or one stays with all 3 and the other goes by themselves (because 3 kids all together in public is not for the weak haha!).  I don’t know if it is just a sign of the big kids getting older and more involved and therefore needing to be run around separately a bit more, or if it is because of the age gap between baby and them…or just that the ease of getting out without all 3 kids is so great at this point that it outweighs my protective instinct of our time together!  Either way…

I miss my husband!  I miss our time all together as often as possible.  And I miss my kids when we are all splitting up, even though it is immeasurably easier to do (it is crazy how when you bring your 2nd kid home, suddenly you are a pro at having just 1 kid, and when you bring your 3rd home suddenly 2 is a piece of cake, amiright mamas of multiple!?).  So as much as I would advise any couples pregnant with their first to really savor their alone time together, I would say the same thing even more as you grow your family!  Because it is a huge change and feels like a big change for us, and one that I am honestly hoping is temporary (though guessing will only grow as more activities start for each).  We had such a sweet 9 years of spending so much free time together, and wouldn’t change this new stage for all the time together in the world because watching the bond grow between our 3 kids is incredible and we are enjoying our sweet little baby so much (and it’s going too fast!). But it is definitely an adjustment, and not really one I anticipated.