Are you done?

Ever since Sam and I married, we have been asked about having children.  First, it was "when do you want kids?”  If you know me at all, you know that I have wanted kids since I was a little girl, so that was an obvious answer.  The next question was "how many?”  I am unsure if Sam and I had a concrete answer at the beginning.  As a child I had always envision between four or six, because five is an odd number.  With each child, we added into our family we would stop and consider what changes an additional child would add to whatever our current situation was.  Then we were given Sonzee.

Prior to Sonzee, I honestly never really considered that we would have a special needs child.  Being in the field of speech language pathology, I was not even really fearful of having a child who might require additional attention, but then again I had never heard of CDKL5 prior to April 17, 2015.  

When I was pregnant with Sonzee, we thought for sure she was a boy.  We had two girls already and only one boy, so obviously this baby was a boy.  I spent an entire eight months envisioning a "girl’s room" and "boys room".  It only dawned on me a month before she was born that this baby could very well be a girl.  I nearly had a panic attack trying to figure out how we would be putting three girls into one bedroom.  (I suppose I should thank G-d for solving that problem).

When we were asked if we would have more children we would joke and say "fourth and final".  I wanted to put that on a sticker for my maternity pictures, but Sam said, "Don't do that, because what if we have another and then that child thinks he/she wasn't wanted".  (No, I am currently not expecting, but I suppose that was some decent foresight).

Prior to Sonzee being born I think I was undecided if I would "want" a fifth child, but I was fairly “certain" that we would be good with four kids.  Six is a nice solid family number, four is an even number of kids, and it would be the "perfect" family.  Now we have Sonzee and three other amazing children.  Yet when I am asked, "are you done?" my reply is not so straightforward.  "Undecided" is my typical response.  

I know I do not owe anyone an explanation as to why we would or would not want another child, but I often struggle with what people would think since we already have four kids and one is special needs.  Would our choice to have a fifth make people think negatively of us?  Shouldn't we just be happy with the kids we already have?  I struggle internally as well.  There are so many positives to having another child, but also so many unknowns.  

I personally do not worry about whether another child of ours would have a CDKL5 mutation, anything is possible, but it is not a hereditary genetic disorder in our case.  Could another child have a disability?  Sure, they could, but that would obviously be what was in the cards for us.  Are we crazy?  Well I would say yes since we have chosen to have four kids on separate occasions.  (Insert stick out the tongue face).

Usually I wonder about my older kiddos, but they have mentioned to us about wanting to have another sibling on multiple occasions.  Would Sam and I get a chance to be better "first time parents" in a sense?  (There would be nothing taken for granted that would be for sure).  What if Sonzee had a bad year the same time a new child was born?  So many questions to siphon through, so many answers we might never get.  Nevertheless, since everything often circles back to Sonzee, what I have been sitting here meddling with is maybe becoming a big sister is something we need to add to her adventure list?!

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