Okay, it’s time to make the announcement official: I am pregnant. Due sometime in late July–I don’t have an official date yet.

I’ll admit it: I’m procrastinating the whole prenatal check-up thing because most days I don’t feel like even cooking and doing dishes, much less getting out and going somewhere. That, and I want a home birth, but I need to see if I can convince my insurance company to cover it. Otherwise we’ll have to pay the midwife out-of-pocket or do it unassisted–and the latter isn’t really something I want to do. I know I could do it, but I don’t really want to be without a professional, and I know my husband would feel the same way.

But that’s not why I started writing this. I just need to get some thoughts down on “paper.” A conversation I had with my brother brought this up, and I just wanted to get it out.

First off, this will be our third child. We had more or less planned on having more children. We just didn’t intend to have one quite yet. We are still living in the rental house, waiting for our place to be fixed up. The deadline for that is the end of February. So hopefully we will make that deadline, or pretty close to it. But after discussing it, we realized that a summer baby, while my husband is not in school (he’s going after his master’s in social work–just finished his first quarter) would be perfect. We could get into the routine of a new baby before school starts again, and he plans on taking paternity leave for a while to help the transition. We realized that waiting until he was doing his internship would not be a good time to have a baby, and if we had waited much longer, the age gap would be larger than we want. Manny will be 3 1/2 when the new baby is born. I’m 3 years older than my brother, and we always wished we could have been closer. So my husband and I are happy with this surprise pregnancy.

But my mother is not. She thought we should have stopped at two. Of course, because this one was unplanned, there wasn’t a whole lot she could say, other than that she hoped we were done. And honestly, I don’t think we could have timed it better if we had planned. Seems God knows best and overrules sometimes, in spite of what we may do. But she sure ranted and raved about it to my brother.

The typical American family has 2.5 children, supposedly. So congratulations are always in order on a second or third pregnancy. But after that, a lot of people will start asking questions like, “Was this one planned?” “How many are you planning on having, anyway?” And any American family that has a lot of kids gets discussed quite a bit behind their backs. Of course, the Duggars are on the extreme end of things, but I remember how my mom talked about the lady who moved to our town and came to church that had 5 kids. “She shouldn’t have so many. How can she take care of them all?” Hey, she ran a daycare! She knew what she was doing. At least in one sense. And she wanted more. What right did we have to say she shouldn’t?

I am not officially quiver full; I believe God has given us the responsibility to be sensitive to issues such as finances, the health of the mother, etc. But I think there is a lot of truth in the quiver-full philosophy. Children are a blessing. And if my husband and I end up having 5 or 6 or more of them, that should not be an issue that affects my relationship with my family.

Now, I know my dad’s family would be fine with it. My dad’s only sister had 5 kids, and now has at least 8 grandchildren and counting. My dad himself had 6 siblings, and he wanted lots of kids. My husband had 4 siblings, and his parents both came from even larger families. My mom, on the other hand, had two brothers, and I think she was unplanned, considering the age gap between her and her older brothers. It’s fine for her to look at the smaller family and say, “It’s so much easier on the mother, easier on the finances, and we are so close to the end of time, etc,” but she’s done having children. This is our family. We don’t know if we are done or not. I figure we’ll know when we get there. But that’s not something I’ll be able to know for at least two years, if then.

I was reading a post on one of the few blogs I still keep up with called Childrearing As Our Profession. As a young adult, my goal was to be a wife and mother. I’m a wife for as long as we both shall live. But I’m a mother in the profession sense only as long as I have children in the home. Of course, I’ll always be their mother, but I can’t really mother them once they grow up. The more kids I have, the more I’ll have the chance to practice that profession.

And I’ve made some mistakes along the way. I’ve let things slide. I’ve lost my vision of motherhood at times. But this pregnancy has been a wake-up call. Once the morning sickness wears off and I can focus on life again, I need to get my home and children in order. I can’t focus on that right now, because I’m in survival mode, but I know that I must soon. Because having another child won’t make it any easier, but being more organized and in control before that child comes will.

So there you have it. My thoughts on having more children. My brother asked me if we still are planning on 10 (I used to joke we would have 10 kids). I told him that we don’t know. We’re going to take them one at a time, and when we’re done, we’ll know. And honestly, I don’t care what my mother thinks. If we have 5 and she can’t afford to come to every birthday party, she won’t hurt my feelings. But she’s the only grandmother my children will ever have–my husband’s mother died a few months after Gislaine was born–so I hope she just accepts that this is our family and we are going to decide between us and God what to do with increasing it or not.

There, I’ve said my piece. It’s late and I’m going to bed. Thanks for “listening,” if you got this far.