My feelings about my girls’ age gap

Spoiler alert: I LOVE my the age gap between my kids! Whenever I talk about my girls, I ALWAYS get asked about their age difference. My oldest, Delaney, is 6 years old, my middle, Margot, is 3 years old and my youngest, Sage, is now 6 months old (how did that happen so fast?!). They are all almost exactly 3 years apart with Delaney’s birthday being in May 2016, Margot’s birthday quickly following in June 2019 and Sage’s is April 2022.

I often get asked:

“Was their age gap planned?”
“Was it hard having them so far apart?”
“Do you wish they were closer in age?”

My short answer is always – Yes!

This was planned, I love their age gap and no, I do not wish they were closer in age. Before I continue, I also want to mention how grateful and lucky my husband and I feel that we were able to choose the timing of our children. I thankfully did not have any infertility but I realize this is often not the case and want to be sensitive to those who do not have the choice on timing as we did. There are so many people and friends of mine who struggle with infertility and simply are not able to time out when they get pregnant and the age gap of their children. That is something that cannot be controlled and I think society puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on us to have the “perfect” age gap between our children (if you choose to and are able to have more than one child). There is absolutely NO perfect age gap between kids. There are pros and cons to having children close together or more spaced out and sometimes you are not able to control that outcome, and it’s so dependent on the family and situation!

After having our first child, I didn’t even begin thinking about having another child until she turned 2. Actually, I may have thought about it before then but my only thought was “I can’t even imagine having another child right now”. I felt neither physically, emotionally, or mentally ready to bring another child into this world. Two weeks after our first daughter was born, my husband started a new career that required very demanding hours. He was actually offered the new position the same day we went into the hospital while I was in labor – lots of excitement that day! While this new career allowed us many great opportunities, he was rarely home for bedtime and oftentimes spent at least one day out of the weekend at the office. Our families both live out of state so having them close by to help was something we lacked. We heavily relied on our nanny at the time (Deema!!) to help out with our work schedules (I was still working 12 hour shifts at the hospital as a NICU nurse) and also to help give us some much needed date nights. I quickly realized how lonely motherhood could be and the thought of another child was not something I wanted to even begin imagining.