Things I've learnt as a Mum of Three

and a few other things I didn't need three kids to find out.

• 
  
  Gas is funny. ALL of my children have laughed at their own ability to produce noxious fumes before they laughed at anything much else.
  
  
  
• 
  
  Gas produced while sitting on someone is even funnier. Dragon took to this one more than the others (so far). As soon as Dragon could crawl Lion learnt that he shouldn't lie on the floor to watch TV or Dragon would crawl over to him and sit ON LION'S HEAD and pop!
  
  
  
• 
  
  People falling over is funny. I never got this, I didn't find it funny and to be honest I worried about Lion's lack of compassion at the start but as he gets older I have seen interesting changes and can look back to where he was and see Dragon there now. At the start everyone falling over was funny and he would try to make himself fall without getting hurt just for the laughs. He then realised that if he gets hurt then so do others but this didn't extend to people on TV, that was still funny. Now he has compassion for people on TV too, he can pick which falls would have hurt or been dangerous and which ones were just silliness and he can see the humor in those. Dragon still can't empathise with the pain of people on TV or his brothers pain but he does get worried about everyone else.
  
  
  
• 
  
  Inside your little house during the day when you have just one kid you are pretty much responsible for any noises that wake the baby. With two kids you can usually get a couple of good naps happening for the baby and the oldest is unlikely to spontaneously burst into tears and come screaming into the nice quiet baby room. With three, naps are the exception, not the rule. If you are alone with the baby that leaves two older children unsupervised and able to injure each other sending one (or BOTH) screaming and crying into the nice quiet room about some perceived injustice or minor injury (or major injury occasionally)
  
  
  
• 
  
  Each child down the line seems to grow up faster than the ones before. Seriously, 4 months old? When did that happen?
  
  
  
• 
  
  With the third child you worry less about SIDS and more about how your older children will manage to kill their younger sibling. Tipping the bassinet over? Shaking the bouncer till the baby goes flying across the room? Crushing the baby while giving "cuddles"? Smothered by kisses? all of these and more are the possibilities.
  
  
  
• 
  
  With your first you are the only one dealing with the nappies, with your second if they say anything about the smell you reply "oh, it's not that bad", with the third you chase the others away with threats of "I'll accidentally drop this stinky disgusting nappy on your head if you keep hovering around behind me"... you know, some people might, not me of course, that's disgusting!
  
  
  
• 
  
  With your first you are the only one that plays the games with the baby, with your second you come up with all sorts of genius modifications to games to encourage them to be playing together, with your third you are more likely to be heard crying "FOR GOODNESS SAKE LEAVE THE BABY ALONE FOR TWO MINUTES!"
  
  
  
• 
  
  With one kid you think you're tired, with two you are sure you can't possibly get more tired than this, with three you are pretty certain that the sleep you managed to get in the last month is approximately how much you got in less than a week as a teenager.
  
  
  
• 
  
  With your first you get cuddles from one sweet little darling, with your second you get cuddles from two sweet little darlings and with your third you get cuddles from THREE sweet little darlings.
  
  
  
• 
  
  I can only imagine things go down hill from here :-)
  
  
  

And most of that is pretty much a summing up of our day today.  Lion has a hole in his head (blood and all) from the tail section of a rather large Lego plane, Dragon had to be forcibly removed from Monkey many times, Monkey DID NOT SLEEP but had lots of very funny gas... and so it goes on...

So what did I miss?  What have you learnt from being a mum?  If you're not a mum what scares you most (other than the childbirth part) about becoming a mum?  What has changed as you have had more kids and if you have more than three does it stabilise at any point?  I have been told that after three there's not much that changes but I'm not inclined to believe that.

Can you believe he's four months old?