Four!

 

Unless you are a foster parent, I'm sorry, but you just don't get it.  

Not surprisingly, the majority of my local friends are also foster parents.  When Christine and Dale had four under five years old, I told them they were amazing.  When Karen and Heather had five (four fosters plus their own infant daughter), I told them they were brave.  When Nicole and Whitney told me they are up to NINE under seven, I didn't know whether to admire them to refer them to a good psychiatrist.

But...

Here I was.  With four kids.  Under three.  Joshua (2 1/2), Baby N (17 months), Kaylie (13 months), and Baby S (2 months).  

The first thing that happened was... Tiernen decided to move out and started looking for an apartment.  I wasn't insulted.  She is 24 and she has a Master's degree and she was ready.  After two years of living in Albany in an apartment, she was happy to leave.  

Plus.  We had four kids.  Under three.  Four kids.  

The next thing that happened was we started looking for a minivan.  Read that again.  Me.  The antiminivan woman.  I was looking for a minivan.  And we found one.  $5,000 for a loaded 2010 Honda Odyssey.  We bought it and had visions of us happily driving around with our four car seats.

Except... we couldn't register the van.  It ended up taking two months, but that's for another post.  Everywhere we went, we drove two cars:  Darryl with two of the kids and me with the other two.  Talk about lots of gas.

Talk about lots period.