Ambiguity

Dash has decided that we, as a family, will write and record a song. B will compose it, Dash will play the drums, Mabel will play the guitar and I'll be the cameraman. I'm not sure who's going to sing - maybe Dash himself. The lyrics have yet to be pinned down, but the general gist is that it's a song about a family where the kids are asking the mum to make another baby for them.

This adorableness coincides uncomfortably with one of those phases I'm having right now where I can't help feeling nudged by whatever - fate, hormones, my biological clock, hormones, probably some more hormones - to get pregnant again, against my better judgment and all good sense. I just have this nagging feeling that two is not meant to be the final number.

"Not again," you're probably sighing, much as Mabel likes to shout incongrously, every now and then. I know, you'd think I'd have resolved this by now, one way or the other. I would have thought so too, but it refuses to be resolved. I mean, I have yet to persuade either myself or my long-suffering husband to attempt to resolve it in one direction, and I have yet to come to terms with the other direction by deciding for good and for all to nix the possibility.

Last night was one of those nights where you spend far too long on high alert for another cough from another room. As I nursed a very jealous Mabel back to sleep while Dash was comforted through an ugly phlegmy coughing fit by his father, I realised how impossible it would all be if we had a baby as well. Not to mention the extra heart-in-hand-ness of just putting your soul out there all over again in another tiny, fragile body: the more you have, the more you have to lose.

But it's not that I want a baby, per se: it's more that our kids are so great, so wonderful and clever and funny and entertaining that it's tempting to think we should make just one more. Just for the heck of it. And while things I said before still stand, what I hadn't taken into account was how the older one(s) age out a little: I'm not saying that Dash is done, exactly, but he doesn't need so much of the hands-on input that he did when he was younger. Mabel, of course, is a different matter.

There are many practical reasons why a third child would be a bad idea: economics, logistics, my age, population control, to name a few. Just imagining the toy explosion that would bury the family room, and all the baby clothes I've already given away and would have to reclaim gives me a headache. I've sold the Baby Bjorn, for goodness sake. Our bed is too high off the ground for the co-sleeper. We've left all that behind, and I'm happy about it.

I am, really.

I don't even know if I want to post this now. It might stop being true any second.