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Notes -
I've got 4 kids (2f, 3m, 4m, 7m) and 2 kids bedrooms. Every week, there's a different combination of kids in the 2 bedrooms based on who's on the ins and outs with each other (and who wants to sleep/read vs play). This all mostly takes care of itself though at least with the kids being young.
The real difficulty is meal time. Each additional kid limits what can reasonably cooked for dinner so that everyone will eat. We've started doing 2 main courses of kids food (e.g. nuggets + pasta or pizza + fish sticks) where we know that each kid will like at least one of the 2 choices. Otherwise, 4 hasn't been any more work than 3.
FWIW my family started falling into the two meal habit for a bit. I still do it as a treat for expensive food - I'm not going to serve my kids prime ribeye till their palate can appreciate it.
But I nipped that shit in the bud fast. I had to grab the reins of cooking for a while to do it which was exhausting after a full work day etc. etc. but the multiplicative effort from it got to be ludicrous.
I've been lucky my kids are responsive to the "no candy after dinner if you don't eat what we brung ya", so while they're picky I just don't care. I'm making stuff I know they like if they'll just try it.
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The way we handle mealtime is we make one supper. And then if you don't like it you can have cereal or a sandwich.
But I'm lucky to have kids with no significant/difficult to accomodate allergies. My friend has a separate set of food restrictions for each kid, it's impossible for her to make only one meal for the family, 2 meals is already an achievement.
The work I feel would linearly increase with each kid is laundry (an unending task with three, I don't know how we wouldn't fall behind with four) and the pickup/dropoff juggle dance (bad enough with the bare minimum of just school/daycare and gets ridiculous if you want to add extracurriculars). Food and supervising definitely doesn't take much additional effort once you're already making the initial investment.
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