To Breed or not to Breed

All my friends are having babies, or talking about babies, or thinking about adding more babies to their current collection of babies and/or children. I'm not sure how I feel about this. We had one baby. It's now a toddler well on its way to becoming an adult and/or howler monkey. Sometimes you don't know until later how they turn out.

So, my friends say (paraphrasing here), you are still at a viable age to produce normal offspring. Why don't you jump on the baby-making bandwagon (not literal-that would be gross) with us?

I look at what that entails: nausea; heartburn; sleepless nights; demonic snoring; sciatica; trying to perfect the "latch" with a recalcitrant infant while going on 0 sleep for two weeks; trying to lose the weight, again; trying to be patient and kind and educate the child when all I want to do is take a shower or have breakfast. I won't even talk about giving birth, because for those of you who got drugs, you have no idea. For those of you who didn't, you know why I'm not talking about it.

Then I look at my son and his quests to eat Vaseline and climb everything and bite the backs of my knees, and I think to myself that he is just perfect. I'm not greedy. I know the next child would be different. Maybe it would sleep through the night starting at four months. Maybe it would want to sleep with us until it was four. Maybe it would prefer Comet to Vaseline. I think I'll just stick to the one.