Making the decision to have a fourth child was something Matt and I thought about, talked about, and prayed about for months and months. It felt like one of the biggest decisions we've made in our marriage. It was so different than our decision making process about our other kids. I remember when we decided to start trying to have a baby for the first time, we both just sort of knew when we were ready. I Then we always knew we wanted more than one child, so adding Samuel to our family was easy too. We wanted our first two kids to be close together in age (and then planned to have a larger age gap between our second and third child. HAHAHAHAHA!), so after Nathan's first birthday, it was easy to decide to try for Baby #2. Way back when Matt and I started dating, we talked about how many kids we wanted to have, and we both quickly answered that we wanted three kids. We both always wanted a larger family than two kids, so while we always planned to add a third child to our family, there was no decision involved in when Elisabeth joined us. She just did her own thing and threw us all for a loop (fits her personality perfectly!).
While I was pregnant with Elisabeth, I always wondered if she'd be my last, but I'd never let myself think about it too much because I would get too sad. When I packed away her baby clothes, I'd wonder if I'd ever get to pull them out again. Somehow once we started having babies when people asked us how many kids we wanted, our answer changed from three to three or maybe four. Honestly though, I think the only way I thought we'd ever have four kids is if we ended up with three boys and wanted to try one more time for a girl :), but we had our three awesome kids, we had boys and a girl, our hands and our hearts were full, but in the back of my mind the question of "Are we sure we're done having kids?" always lingered.
The fact that we had Samuel and Elisabeth so close together complicated both sides of our decision to have another baby. Once Elisabeth turned eighteen months or so, I started to realize how fast we were moving out of the baby/toddler stage. She's always been big for her age, and her verbal and communication skills have always been advanced, so when she was eighteen months old, she looked and acted like a two year old. I just couldn't believe that I had three kids, and in just five years, I felt like I was moving out of the baby/toddler stage. I wasn't ready to be out of that season of life. I felt like I got robbed a little of the sweet baby stage from both Samuel and Elisabeth's babyhood because of having them only seventeen months apart. So, on that end, I wanted more kids. BUT, by the time Elisabeth got close to two years old, the benefits of having kiddos close in age were showing up. We noticed how well all three kids could play together, how their interests were similar, how fun it was that as they were getting older we could do more things with them, and we wondered how adding another baby with a larger age gap would change that dynamic that Matt and I were enjoying with our three kids in three years family makeup.
So about a year ago, we both sort of bringing up the idea of having one more baby. We both would change our minds every single day. Seriously, one day I would think that I was sure we needed one more baby to even out and complete our family, and then the next day I would feel so content and complete with our three blessings. I remember one day, we drove past train tracks and we laughed about how that used to be the highlight of toddler Nathan's day when he saw a train track, and Matt randomly said, "I think I want another baby." And then the next day, the kids would act crazy, and he'd change his mind. While we talked about it last year, we also had already committed to going to Venezuela that summer on a mission trip, so that delayed any immediate decision (Venezuela was not a country we felt safe traveling to if I was pregnant). We always just said, we'll talk about it when we get back, there's no reason to make a decision now. Well, we got back from Venezuela and still couldn't decide. I remember we talked about it once during a date shortly after we returned and it turned into a conversation about all the reasons we wanted one more child and all the reasons we didn't, and then the conversation ended. About a month after we got back from Venezuela we made a last minute decision to go to Disney World in October. Since it was just a few weeks away, and I knew I'd enjoy Disney World much more not being pregnant at the time, we delayed our decision again.
Just a couple of weeks after we returned from Disney before we had any more opportunities for baby talks, I ended up in the hospital with a diagnosis of MS. There were so many things we processed during those hours in the ER after the doctor told us the results of the MRI, but I remember wondering if that diagnosis would end any of our thoughts of having another baby, and I remember feeling really sad about the possibility of not having any more children. For me, that was a pivotal moment where I realized that yes, I really did want another baby. Matt still wasn't sure (I think he was concerned about my health), but we talked at length with our neurologist and not only was he so positive and hopeful about my diagnosis and prognosis in general, but he was especially optimistic about pregnancy, letting us know that pregnancy is one of the most effective treatments in preventing MS relapses. He recommended we have six more kids, ha! However, I received high doses of steroids in the hospital, so we still had to postpone any decision for several more weeks until those side effects were gone. In the meantime we still talked back and forth with no firm decision.
Finally, at the beginning of January there was nothing delaying a decision any longer, and we sort of didn't even talk about it much. I think we both just knew that after so much talking and deciding, we probably really did want to add to our family or we wouldn't have thought about it so much. We both think our kids are pretty awesome, and we see a lot of benefits of having a larger family particularly when our kids are older. We both thought that a few years from now we'd probably regret not having one more baby. God blessed us quickly with a positive pregnancy test, and although I might have occasional moments of panic about adding another baby to our already crazy life, we feel immensely blessed and grateful for the opportunity to add more love to our family. We are looking forward to the coming months with grateful and excited hearts. This baby is a blessing to our entire family, and we can't wait to become a family of six!
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