Hands Full

 If you think my hands are full, you should see my heart

-Emily at A Heartful

 I read several blogs from large families and one of the things that the authors will occasionally comment on is their annoyance at strangers commenting that they have their hands full when they're out with their whole family.  I've starting hearing that myself when I am holding a child by each hand and have Water in his carrier.  The first time someone said it I just looked down at my kids then back up at the woman and smiled and said, "yes".  I've never been happier to have my hands full with something before.  I'm sure hearing it probably gets old after a while, especially if it's all that people say, but for now it sounds pretty good.
  We do have our hands full though.  I remember when we in the process of adopting Fire everyone told us that the transition from one to two kids would be hard, since suddenly each parent would have a kid to take care of.  No more free hands to do something extra.  I really didn't think having another person to take care of at home was the hard part- it was more that the person was a baby who didn't sleep through the night for almost a year and that his big sister struggled with having to share us.  The work was harder but the work load (other than laundry!) didn't really increase.  Now that we have three kids, it's absolutely harder.  Someone always needs something and there isn't always a parent available to help them.  Someone has to wait.  Unexpectedly, because Kai is so calm, he's usually the one that ends up waiting.  Maybe it would be easier if our older kids really were older but at 2 and 4, they still need us for almost everything and it's hard to decide who gets which part of our limited energy.  I'm hopeful that things will settle down a little bit when we're back home and things are more like the normal the kids are used to.