Right, Kate, sit back as I tell you what life’s like with three babas!
IT was a simple gesture that spoke volumes – more than even he can appreciate. As Prince William prepared to take his wife and new baby home from hospital on Monday, he raised three fingers to demonstrate the scale of the adventure ahead. ‘Thrice the worry now!’ he joked.
It was interesting – and given that he might have looked like either an ageing rock star or Conor McGregor, something of a relief – that William didn’t make a similar gesture when Baby Number Two arrived, but as every parent of three children knows, it’s the third that makes the family.
Whatever about the third time being the charm, a third child is frequently the glue that turns a successful, streamlined parenting operation into a family. Two children can be evenly distributed between parents – particularly if they are different genders – but three is a job lot, a proper handful that cannot be split into equal parts.
With three, you are wonderfully, chaotically outnumbered and lopsided. Three means one parent has to do more of the emergency toilet runs than the other; three means the one who escapes that heavy lifting has to make up for it in other ways. Two children are friends, rivals, companions, sidekicks. Three are family. Thrice the worry, thrice the cost, thrice the room. And, as William and Kate are about to find out, absolutely thrice blessed.
I never realised, when I was expecting our third, that the dynamic of our family was about to be significantly altered forever. Before Number Three, it was not unusual for their Dad and I to do different things with the two children at the same time. In the park, the boys might kick a ball while we girls played with her collection of tiny figures in the grass. It never felt like separate time, or time spent apart. But when the third, a girl, showed up, the time the boys spent together was suddenly separate. Simply by virtue of superior numbers, the girls were family, and so the boys simply joined us. No longer easily divisible, we were now a gang.
And just like the newly-expanded royal family, ours was a very young gang indeed. Even with an army of nannies and a Mothercare goldcard, having three children under five is a huge responsibility and a significant challenge. When Number Three joined our crew, I can remember people asking if we were careless or simply mad – the logistics of being in charge of so many small people seeming so daunting to outsiders.
The good news for the Cambridges, though, is once you’re in the eye of that particular perfect storm, it’s not nearly as difficult to navigate as the optics suggest. In our tiny household, we found the arrival of numbers two and three was hugely influential in coaxing their predecessors out of nappies and soothers, for example.
And though I won’t be holding my breath to see the new prince trotted out in his big brother’s hand-medowns, my baby barely needed any new clothes at all.
But the absolute best part of having three children so close together in age is that they go through the same phases at the same time. You can all go to see the same film in the cinema, and the same programmes will make them all laugh on television. In Disneyland, you can all queue to go on the same rides together.
OF course, there may also be days when all three drive you so mad that you actually consider booking an expensive return flight to Australia just so that you can get out of the house but, presumably, that’s where nannies step in.
It also probably won’t apply to the royals, but there were a few precious years when my three were all in the same primary school, and then the same secondary school together. And that never ends: my three recently all went to the same gig by a totally obscure punk band together and – just last Saturday – coming in from their part-time jobs and parched from the sunshine, the older two were disappointed to find that there was only a single bottle of cold beer in the fridge – so they agreed to share it.
I won’t trouble the royals with the small downside of such an intense experience of child-rearing; that it burns brightly but briefly, and that after what feels like a single blink, you wake up one day and find all your children have grown up. But that prospect needn’t occupy the young royals right now as they begin life as a fully-bonded, wonderfully lopsided family.
They may have plummy voices, wear clothes that belong to a previous century, and be unable to play with tiny figures in the park without the company of a long lens, but right now, as they begin the most wonderful adventure of them all, I envy them every magical, bewildering second they have ahead.