A matter of when not if…

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leah_talbot

New member
My (31f) wife (30f) gave birth to a beautiful little boy last summer. We used IVF to conceive as we are cis lesbians and have all the love but not all the parts.

We absolutely adore our child and it affirms to me how much I wanted to be a mom and how much I love kids. As he approaches his 1st year, my wife and I are talking more and more about having another, but it’s unclear when we should. We are leaning toward 2 year gap, but wonder if that’s the best idea for our son, us as parents, long-term. Do kids 3 or 4 years apart play as well together as those 2 years apart?

When does it make sense to have #2?

We are just looking for some input and perspectives to help us decide.

Key points:
- We have several frozen, viable fertilized eggs that are ready to be used when we are ready. We have to pay 4K-ish to cover implant, medications, implant monitoring, etc. this is not a huge expense for us but not something we can pay for without planning a 1-3 months in advance.
- my son attends local daycare and he absolutely loves it. His teachers are great and we plan to have him there until he turns 3 at which point he can attend the independent school I work at for free. Unfortunately, it’s a HUGE chunk of change currently. Until he’s 15 months, it is running us about 2,300k a month, but will go down to 1,800 once he can transfer out of the infant room and into the toddler room. Financially we can afford to have one in infant and one in toddler but it’ll be.. tight. Luckily after each kid is 3 childcare goes to 0$ so we are lucky in that regard.
- My wife experienced delayed PPA and I worry she isn’t ready to carry and parent another kid. She assures me she is recovering and will be ready if we do a 2yr gap, but I have this fear a second pregnancy may be too much. She is getting medical and psychological help and has improved SOOOO much. She’s fucking amazing.
- We always wanted kids close in age. I have a brother 8 years younger than me and I was parentified from his birth to be his second mom. We are intentionally not going to do that to our kids and want them to be individuals that can spend time together should they want.
- Another reason for 2-year age gap vs 3 or 4… We follow pretty closely follow the Waldorf method of age appropriate toys, activities, expectations, etc. and having kids closer in age may make it easier to meet each child where they are developmentally as they are closer in age.
- Further on that point, I have talked with friends with older kids that say a closer age gap makes it easier for just fun activities: museums, movies, play, etc as the kids generally like the same stuff around the same age.
- Personally, I cannot tell if I’m relying too heavily on our kids being similar if we do a 2 year age gap. I understand each kid is unique and will have their own wants/personality/etc.
- might be important to note our state does not allow me (non-genetic mom) to do reciprocal surrogacy aka carry our eggs/future children. It’s considered medical tissue “donation” and we would have to challenge the state fertility medical board in order to possibly get approval… that’s just not gonna happen.
- Our little boy is amazing and we are not sure we are ready to split our time between him and a future sibling just yet! We are stupidly lucky he was a great sleeper and eater since a wee little infant. I am not concerned about having a more high needs kid because I anticipated that with our first but was surprised when he wasn’t that way.

Thanks for any advice or anecdotes!
 
@leah_talbot Mine are 23 months apart. It’s rough. If you don’t have a lot of help I’d say do 3 years.

Yes it’s nice when they play but they also fight. My oldest was such an easy baby but he feels I destroyed his life when I had his brother :(
 
And #2 is a wild thing and needy so #1 feels neglected and acts out too. It’s just now at age 4 1/2 and 2 1/2 getting easier.

All kids have their own personalities and they may not be friends.

Both boys are asking for a baby sibling now though. Hence why I’m in this group- wondering if I should go for #3.
 
@leah_talbot Fellow 2 mom family here. 🖐 Our daughters are about 4 years apart (my oldest is 4 and youngest is 3 months). It's been an amazing age gap so far. My older daughter loves to help, adores being a big sister; we haven't had any jealousy or regression issues at all. She's pretty independent and is fully potty trained and sleeping all night, so that makes newborn life MUCH easier. Plus she's heading to pre-K full time right about when the baby will start getting more mobile, so that will help my wife as the SAHP. I also had pretty awful PPD for a couple years after having our first and just didn't feel ready for another for a while. Lexapro has mostly resolved that for me.
 
@leah_talbot My kiddo is closing in on 4, and I’m currently pregnant with #2. EDD puts the age gap at just under 4.5 years.

IMO, there’s a lot of social conditioning (especially in the US) to have kids about 2yrs apart. That was never something that appealed to me because I used to be a nanny to toddlers - there’s a long time between when they get mobile and when they’re old enough to not get into trouble if you turn around for even a minute, I’d say from roughly when they start walking until they’re about 3. But YMMV dependent on the disposition of your son.

Our ILs have two kids almost exactly 2yrs apart, and things have only started to get more manageable for them now that their youngest just turned 2. It’s been a hard couple years for them because their kids often had competing needs and their older child wasn’t old enough to understand why his needs sometimes had to take a backseat to their baby’s.

I feel super good about our age gap. Our daughter is fully potty-trained (including nighttime), sleeps through the night, can dress and undress herself, and understands that there will be a baby and is enthusiastic about helping and teaching the baby things. I’m kind of a crunchy/babywearing type parent, so baby will just get strapped into a carrier and will tag along to my older child’s activities. By the time our baby is even ready for group childcare, our daughter will be in public kindergarten so we’ll only be paying for one child to be in school/daycare at a time.

I also had pretty severe PPA, and I wouldn’t say I was even truly ready until our daughter was 3. It took me a long time to not feel so overwhelmed, but part of that was the fact that our daughter was very high needs (she was a Velcro baby/toddler) until she was about 2.5. I didn’t have the bandwidth for another kid until she was in preschool.

Also: I think it’s important to be aware that there’s no guarantee siblings will play well together even if they’re close in age. My IL’s kids can play, but there’s a ridiculous amount of fighting - over toys, attention, different ideas… everything. My kid and their younger one started getting along really well in the last few months or so, not because they’re only 18mo apart, but because they just have similar interests and playing styles.

In the end though, you have to do what’s best for your family. If you’d rather have the childbearing/baby years behind you all at once - then go for it. If you’d rather give yourselves a chance to catch up on sleep and get a breather, then wait! There’s no right or wrong answer - just what’s best for your needs/wants and your family!
 
@leah_talbot I had severe PPD for two solid years after my first, and my kids have a 3.5 year age gap. (Ended up with severe PPD after the second too, but so it goes.) Anyway, I like that age gap! I would have waited a little longer even, but I had my second at 40 as it was. We did have one year of daycare overlap which was financially challenging. But I had/have to pay daycare tuition until kindergarten, so at least you've got that great school benefit going which will help lessen the long-term impact.

Mine are 3 & 6 now, and play together pretty well. A lot of young sibling rivalry that I've observed in friends' families seems to happen in kids with a closer age gap, because they ARE developmentally a little closer. It can mean you have not one but two little people who have zero capacity for emotional regulation and who also want to do the same thing. It's not like 3-4yos are necessarily pros at this either, but they're way better than 2yos IME (and my oldest was/is our challenge kid). There really isn't anything we go and do as a family where my oldest is bored or my youngest is overwhelmed; might be a bit of a sweet spot but honestly that part has always been easy. (It's the ONLY part that's been easy, lol.)
 
@stuart1717 Thank you for sharing about the sibling rivalry you see in friends’ kids. We don’t have many friends with young kids so it’s good to hear those story secondhand.
 
@stuart1717 I had severe ppd/ppa also with my now 3yo (and hated the sleep deprivation- he didn’t sleep through the night consistently until like 1.5) when he was 2.5-3 I finally got off Zoloft. Husband wants another and I’m on the fence. I love my sweet boy so much now and I don’t want to do that to him- turn into the zombie of a mom I was before, and not get to enjoy him for a solid 2ish years. Can you tell me it’s worth it and I’ll survive.
 
@muya To your last sentence, there are still many days where I wish I'd stopped at one. Those days are fewer and farther between than they used to be, but they still exist.

But, the thing you and I did with our 3yos was parent (unplanned) through Covid. And I'm here to say that my hard kid was born pre-pandemic, and the first three years of her life - while hugely challenging - were overall easier than what it was like to have a baby right before Covid and then parent through THAT. What you and I and a lot of others did was live through a very special version of hell. Or at least that's what it was for me (my sister also has an almost 3yo and she loved parenting in the pandemic but she and her husband didn't have to worry about work and love nothing more than never leaving their house anyway - so for her it was a bonus).

So it's hard to say. I'm on antidepressants and in therapy, and my husband and I are in couples therapy, and now my 6yo is in therapy (which was probably inevitable given who she is). There's not very much joy in our lives because there's no time to create it, between parenting and working and no local family support to take the edge off. But the advantage you have with having a second is that you can do things to plan for what you know will be hard. I did that, and for the first six weeks of my son's life and before Covid hit it was...okay. I had a counselor who I started seeing at the end of my second pregnancy so I could have a connection established. I had sleep trained my first (who was still a challenging sleeper and always has been), and had more of a sleep plan for my second. Parenting through Covid was horrific, especially making that adjustment from 1-2. There are absolutely lots of small things that would have been different about that adjustment without Covid. I could have taken the kids to a playground or just fucking ANYWHERE to get out of the house, for example.

Anyway, that's a lot and I hope it's not too much! I hope your husband cares about your mental health and well-being. Having two is hard, but I do think there might be ways that adjusting to two would be easier than a lot of your adjustment to one might have been. I would really tell your husband what you think you'll need for your sanity and so on.
 
@stuart1717 Thank you for the detailed reply. Your “my life doesn’t have much joy” hits hard. Because my life is pretty good now. It’s not too hard. And I don’t want to eff that up. But DH 100% wants another. And part of me wonders what I might be missing. Like a daughter.
 
@leah_talbot My two are 19 months apart, and I’m currently pregnant with our last, who will come when they are 4.5 and almost 3. They’ve all been planned, and we wanted a small gap with our first two because I’m older and we thought we might want 3 (will be 37 when this kid arrives), it seemed logistically easier with school drop offs/activities/being in the same development phase, and I’m a twin so I couldn’t imagine not having someone close in age to grow up with it. All those things have held true, and especially now, it’s great that my kids can play together independently and keep each other occupied for long stretches. There’s still a lot of sibling rivalry and they can be rough with each other, so I’m hoping they grow out of that over time. That being said, the first 3 months were tough. There was no real way to prepare my oldest for his brother, and he mostly ignored him but also could be jealous/rough. So it was a lot of policing behavior. It was also pretty exhausting because he still needed a lot and couldn’t express himself (read: tantrums). My husband and I had very little down time for the first year, but it got infinitely better by like 6 months. We agreed for a bigger gap for #3 and 2.75 seemed like a sweet spot to us - still relatively close for all the benefits that we wanted with our first two but more time for our middle to get out of diapers, become more independent, develop his language skills, etc. I’ve also enjoyed the pregnancy more and am looking forward to aspects of having a newborn in a way I didn’t with my second since it felt like I had just done this and there was no break. So, no clue how it’ll go once baby gets here, but I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the spacing you’re looking at. So much of it is about the personalities of your kids and what you and your wife want out of your lifestyle. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have started trying for #2 or #3 until I felt fully physically and mentally ready, that’s so much more important than a few months/years of spacing.
 
@leah_talbot We are thinking a 4 year gap. It’s much easier financially (since we have to pay for care from infant to kindergarten) and 3 is the first age that has seemed “easy”. I’m hoping that by 4-5 my son will be more mature and adapt to a sibling without jealousy. Many parents I know have a two year gap. Their kids seem happy and play together as older children but having two young kids seems really tough. I was absolutely not ready to have another when my son was 1-2 and really didn’t want to consider it until he was 2.5.
 
@leah_talbot Our gap is 2.75 years and I think it’s the closest I’d go personally. A lot of friends of mine have gaps from 18 months to 2 years and I think the only situation in which I’d advocate that is if you’re older and time is running out. Our daughter is old enough to be left unsupervised for brief periods of time and be trusted not to get herself into too much trouble if my hands are full at the grocery store for instance. It’s not always easy but it’s significantly less challenging.
 
Just wanted to add that it’s kind of nuts about your state not letting you carry the children (if you were indeed interested in doing that). If my partner could take a turn being pregnant and potentially nursing, that would be an enormous game changer.
 
@freddied Thanks for sharing your perspective; yea I was interested in reciprocal surrogacy for our family, but the laws are not on our side. We did the entire IVF process together (shots, medication, picking the donor, driving to and from doctors). It’s crazy the state doesn’t see them as my kids when a straight couple with eggs fertilized with donor sperm are considered the dad’s kids. I’m even in a blue state in a major city.
 
@leah_talbot 2.75 years age gap too and I am glad it wasn’t sooner. My son reacted for a solid 6-8 months, not towards baby but towards us. After that though it’s been very good.

After the first year of having number two, they are starting to play well together. Oldest enjoys toys a little younger than his age from timeto time and youngest enjoys toys for older kids.

I think a 3 year age gap is the sweet spot IMO. It’s not always easy but definitely easier than two under two.
 
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