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I wanted a lifetime of that.
And that was exactly what I was walking down the aisle to promise him.
Alaric - 3 years
“Okay, I changed my mind,” Siana said, still wearing her hospital band on her wrist as she snapped about fifty-thousand pictures of our baby as he slept peacefully in his bassinet beside our bed.
“About what?” I asked, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her close.
“About having areasonablenumber of children,” she said, shooting me a heavy-lidded smile. “I think we need an absolutelyunreasonable number of these,” she said, reaching down to stroke a finger down his doughy cheek.
He was a plump fucking baby. It was almost hard to believe he’d been inside of his tiny little mother.
We’d done a lot of talking when we’d decided we were ready to expand our family. About how many. About if we would stay and expand, or buy a new house.
For the former, we decided that a reasonable number of kids was two or three. And that we loved our home too much to ever leave, but we could see adding a second floor for more living space.
Sure, I had some issues with my own upbringing. But most of that came from an absent father and a mother too busy looking for a partner to take care of her kids, from debilitating poverty, and the feeling of hopelessness.
It was never about my siblings.
It was about too few resources spread way too thin between us.
Siana and my children’s lives would never be like that. We had enough to support however many children we decided to have. We had both of us and our dedication to them, but also a massive extended family to rely on for support.
I felt there was a reason so many of the club brothers and their wives had so many kids was because they all had the support of the “village.”
“What do you think?” Siana asked.
“I think we should maybe get through our first week before we make any decisions,” I said, pressing a kiss to her temple.
“That’s fair,” she agreed as the baby went from as calm as could be to screaming his head off in a blink.
Siana - 11 years
We’d settled on four.
Which still somehow felt perfectly reasonable, even if it required us to build on a second level, so all the kids had their own rooms.
It was one of Alaric’s, surprisingly few, terms when it came to creating a family. As a kid who never got to have any privacy growing up, he wanted his kids to have their own rooms, their own doors to close to get away from everything when they needed to.
As an only child who also really appreciated having private space and alone time, I’d been whole-heartedly in agreement on that one.
“Moooom,” a familiar refrain called from out back as I just tried to squeeze in a couple edits on some photographs that were due in only two days.
“Yeah?” I called back, hoping it was just a request for something specific for dinner, or something that wouldn’trequire my presence. Because, by my clock, I had all of ten minutes left before our one-year-old woke up from his nap, grumbly and ravenous for some food since he’d been too stubborn to eat much for breakfast.
“Look what we made,” he called.
Our eldest.
Who took after neither Alaric or me somehow. If anything, he reminded me a lot of Saskia, if anyone. Daring, brave, extroverted, and sure of himself.
“I’m coming,” I called, closing my laptop lid, telling myself that I would just have Alaric bring the big kids to the clubhouse to swim, so I could get some work done later.
I moved out the back door, my glasses fogging immediately, thanks to the humidity, and I had to wait for them to clear before I could see what they were up to.
“We built them a playground,” our second child declared. He reminded me a lot of his father. Kind, easy-going, a little unsure of himself at times, but willing to keep trying, regardless.
