Last night, Minor woke up wailing about an hour after I put him to bed. I was upstairs catching up on work, and Husband was putting Aitch to bed in the next room. Minor had puked, so we changed and washed him and the sheets, and eventually I rocked him back to sleep while Husband read stories to Aitch in the next room, Dog curled up at the foot of Aitch’s bed.

It was an unusual situation, all of us tucked into that one little corner of the house. The boys have adjoining rooms, so we usually try to stagger their bedtimes so they don’t disturb one another during the crucial falling-to-sleep moments. So I may be forgiven if my brain skipped a beat there in the dark, and I had a moment of panic in which I thought, “If I’m here and Husband and Dog are in the next room, then who’s downstairs with the other baby?”

Oh, right. We don’t have another baby. It really feels like we should, though. Like there is a third kid out there for our family.

Even as I write that, I know that the scenario I described above — the two of us taking turns putting the kids to bed so that one of us can rush back to work — underscores a selfishness that means we are not really good candidates for a third baby. Oh, I know that if a kid showed up on our doorstep we’d adjust; it would be chaos for awhile, but we’d figure it out. But adjusting to the inevitable is different from planning it.

Sometimes I wish that a child would show up on our doorstep. I imagine that one of the boys’ birth mothers will place another child for adoption, and the agency will contact us. That seems kind of mean-spirited, though, wishing another unplanned pregnancy on someone.

Then, on the other hand, I imagine that the agency will call us and say that one of the birth mothers had twins, and then I’m just thrown back into panic mode and grateful that we just have the two.

How do you know when you’re done? I know no one will come forward and say they really wish they hadn’t had that last kid, but does anyone with one or two feel happy about stopping when they did?