I’m often asked what it’s like to have children so close together.  Mostly it’s asked in kind of a mystified pitying sort of way, often preceded with a phrase like ‘You’ve got your hands full!’.  Then people usually conjecture whether it is easier or harder to space children out, relate their own experience and proclaim that James and I definitively crazy (maybe they just do that last part with their eyes, but almost everyone says “       I could never do that”).   

Just to clarify, we certainly don’t have the closest children I’ve seen, particularly in Mormon families.  Louis and Elsie are 21 months apart.  Elsie and Pearl are 18 months apart and Pearl and the new baby will be 22 months apart, our “record” for child spacing.  Louis will have just turned five a month before this new baby is born.  So they are close, but nothing to make the Guinness Book of world records.  I see plenty of families here with kids that close and they do things wonderfully.

Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post.  I get a lot of questions and people always weigh in on whether it is easier or harder to have them close together and it’s made me think- is it easier to have them close together or further apart?

And here is my glorified opinion: It is harder to have kids close together….. about half of the time.  And it is easier to have your kids close together … about half the time.   Translation: That’s a really dumb question.  The longer I have my own kids, see my family members and friends with theirs and just live life I think speculating like this on family size, spacing and methods are just plain old waste of time. 

Having kids close together is a lot of work when they are young.  There are constant messes to clean up and for a while you are just a servant to little mouths and insistent demands.  The first six months after Pearl was born were particularly demanding for me.  But now that she’s 18 months there are definite advantages- they will disappear together and play for significant amounts of time!  Louis and Elsie are constantly chatting and playing- running around making up imaginary worlds that are just adorable.  I love to listen to them play.  They have built in playmates and the play dates I used to crave and need when Louis was two don’t have the same significance anymore since they are always playing together.  Will this make them better friends later in life?  I’d like to think so, but all the research indicates that not really the case- it is more a matter of luck and whether they actually like each other as adults.  I’ve seen families with lots of space in between siblings that still have very tight knit relationships.

There are things that I do worry about- will they get enough attention as individuals?  I love my big family, but absolutely craved individual adult attention.  Will the middle children feel neglected?  Did they get enough attention as babies when they were pushed out of the nest before they even turned two?  I see families with three to four years between each kid and watch how much they are just able to enjoy their little babies, without a toddler also needing a lot of love.  It looks delightful. 

Anyway, I think you get the point.  There are advantages and worries to anyway you create your family.  The only thing that makes it perfect is that it’s your family.  I absolutely love having our kids close together despite that chaos and hard work of caring for multiple young ‘uns because they are ours- and this is our family’s story.  So when people ask me dumb questions like if I’m tired or tell me I have my hands full I just smile and tell them it’s great, because really, it is.