How’s it going with three children?

Another response to a question from a friend:

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With three with three with three. Let me first say that I met a lady a few weeks ago who has nine kids! I used to feel like I really had it tough with three, until I heard how many she had. That made me feel like "quit trippin' about your three!" Like "you need to just 'man up'. It's not that bad.

But I have to realize that because they're doing it with 9, doesn't mean 3 is not still hard. And just because I'm doing it with 3 doesn't mean 2 is not hard for someone else and 1 is not hard, etc. etc. I could go on.... Just being married with no kids ...... being engaged ... being single!!!
So let's see, aside from the fact that it's fun, it's rewarding, it's wonderful to see how much they look alike and how many things in their looks are unique from each other...and so on......
It's tough going places with the three of them when it's just me. When I have to go to the grocery store, or God-forbid the mall. Grocery store is okay if I'm not there for long and they have a basket that seats Monte and Moriah. Then I can put Ja'el in the basket part and get a few groceries and pile them around her or have Monte and Moriah hold the overflow :-)
Discipline is the other hurdle that we're working on. Monte is going through his two year old challenging stage. It seems like he's coming to the latter part of it though thank God. For a while he used to take off running whenever we would go out side of the house, out in the foyer at church, going in and out of their school, ...almost everywhere. One time I went to the mall and I had to get one of those backpack things with a strap so I could hold onto him while I pushed the stroller with Ja'el and also watch Moriah. (I didn't have the double stroller available at the time because I didnt' get it out of storage in time for the trip I was taking to the mall. Poor planning on my part. But the backpack thing worked pretty well.)

Oh and there was the first trip to the doctor's office with all three of them. Bad decision. But I learned a lot from it. It was Ja'el's two week visit. Moriah and Monte stayed home with me for a few weeks to save money from paying day care. Getting out of the car and going into the doctor's office was fine. The waiting room wasn't even bad. It was walking down the hallway to the "patient room" and chasing down "the boy" and keeping him from getting into stuff. Once we got into the room and he and Ja'el had been weighed and measured, I had to sit down in the patient room with Ja'el in my arms and try to keep him and Moriah under control with only one hand. I had not done enough prepping with them to instruct them on how they should behave in such a situation. And what really made me mad was when the nurse practitioner or whatever her title was came in and started talking with us and doing their exams,and after seeing him be all over the place and not listen, she would call his name and look in his eye and follow the "text book rules" for speaking to a toddler get him to say "ok" It made me feel like she was trying to prove that this is the way you talk to them, what you're doing is not working. Whatever. She was partly right though. The reason I didn't do what I would have normally done in private was because I felt I would look and sound like a crazy woman. I'm learning now to speak differently to them when disciplining them. In a way that will be acceptable in public and also in private. I still fail sometimes but I'm working on it!

I could go on... "