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Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.
People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.
It's kids. It's always been kids.
Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.
And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.
People say having kids is really hard but i strongly disagree with that. It's pretty easy, your life is just different.
If you're hellbent on travelling and partying then, yes, it's going to be hard, but if you're intending to care for your kids it's pretty easy, especially if your not trying to force them to become something they're not.
I think an issue is that some people don't actually want to have kids and they whine loudly and incessantly, with some other parents jumping on the bandwagon for clout. In my friend group there is one person that's actually had a hard time and a fair bit of that is self inflicted, and none of us were really aiming to have kids. In reality almost every single parent I know (including myself) are very satisfied with being parents.
Don't let the whine brigade fool you into thinking having kids is some kind of herculan endeavour, it's not.
How many do you have?
Not that guy, but I have four, and I more or less agree.
Maybe I’m just in a different phase of it then. I said above but I have 4 kids under the age of 5.
One of them is teething and having a sleep regression, and she wakes up at night quite a bit.
We recently all got norovirus from an indoor playground we went to.
We also recently took a trip to Oregon. Travel is’harder with that many kids.
Finding a babysitter for that many kids at that age is difficult.
I don’t know I guess if somebody tells me that having kids wasn’t difficult, I wonder if we just mean different things. Most meaningful things are difficult.
The hardest part of parenting (in a practical, non-poetical sense) is the sleep deprivation. That will get better with time, but with 4 littles under 5 I imagine it is a struggle to get sleep. But just think of how great it will be when they're all old enough to sleep properly!
And having just traveled with a preschooler and a toddler on a 4 hour plane trip, I concur that travel sucks. They want to run around! They certainly don't want to wear their seatbelts.
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Having 4 kids in a 5 year time span is pretty hardcore though, you don't have to do it like that.
My oldest is 8 and my youngest was just born, so ours are little more spread out. I think you're probably in the toughest spot right now. It was most difficult when we had 6/3/0 -- needy 1st grader + potty training rebellious toddler + newborn is really hard because they all demand very different things from you (in our case, mental/emotional engagement, constant attention and discipline, and constant hands-on care and supervision, respectively). I used to say that we were worn out, mind body and soul, by the end of every day.
I guess when I say it's not "difficult" I don't mean that it's not demanding, but that it doesn't require a extreme IQ, physical conditioning, net worth, etc. to accomplish. It also benefits from tapping in to our deepest instincts -- I can easily justify skipping the gym or watching trash TV instead of praying or reading a book, but I don't think I'm capable of just ignoring our screaming newborn, or not feeding the older kids, or ignoring my kids for days on end so I can play my favorite PC game or something. I don't always want to do those thinga but there's some primal drive that makes me get off the couch and do them anyway that I (unfortunately) don't have when it comes to doing squats or ab wheel rollouts.
All that said, the lack of sleep, minimal social life, and all around lack of freedom certainly takes a toll. But (as I'm sure is the case with you) I truly cannot imagine anything more meaningful I could be doing with my life.
Hang in there for the next few years. If there's one bit of advice I could offer, it's to get your kids doing chores as early as possible. All of our kids could shower themselves by age 4, and they could wash their younger siblings by age 6. My two elementary school age kids put away all the clean dishes and clean up the living room nearly 100% of the time, and they fold about 80% of the clean laundry, and they automatically do all their after school chores (putting away books, backpacks, etc) and change clothes after coming home from school. After every meal they all clear the table together and wipe it down. Even my 3 year old is doing small chores here and there (mostly "put this thing over there" type stuff). Kids are capable of a lot more than is typically demanded of them these days. In the meantime, I'd spring for a maid service if you can afford it. Sadly our area doesn't have one, but I would have been willing to pay quite a bit for one a few year ago.
When you have 2 kids you can spoil them, but when you reach 4+ it becomes more like captaining a ship and its crew than what is commonly thought of as "parenting." There's just so much work to be done to keep everyone clean, clothed, and fed that two adults simply can't do it all for more than a year or two without totally burning out.
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Well at least my experience was that my wife and I loved having kids so much, that we wanted to have more. Thus: 4 under 5.
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