I am proud to report that my plan from last week, not to overeat and to only eat regular meals at meal times or when my blood sugar is low, went swimmingly well over the Thanksgiving weekend. As you all know, this is a tricky time of year.
I also went to visit my endocrinologist this week. He had to think long and hard, and look at me for a few moments, to figure out whether I was joking, when I told him that I was pregnant. After the usual heckling, he asked me seriously:
"Do you all have a number in mind?" (Read: are you ever going to just stop having babies?)
"No, there's no number. We'd like to have as many as we reasonably can. We also recognize that life is highly variable."
Right now, my husband and I are really learning to surrender our lives to our children (ages 4, 3, 18 months, and in utero). We are enjoying them more each day, when we used to spend more time being irritated and feeling inconvenienced by them before. But we are also feeling the pinch and the pain of so much responsibility. Our attentions only go around so far, the crying can really disturb everyone's peace, and we are exhausted and physically in pain and grossed out with great regularity. We are also continually uncertain about whether we are addressing the right need at the right time and in the right way.
So we don't make commitments about the number of children we'll have, because we love them so much but life is also more complicated because of them. The only commitment we make is to love each and every one, to the best of our ability, from the moment of conception onward!