Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 273 | How to Transition into a Growing Family

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Ep. 273 | How to Transition into a Growing Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  that's exciting. Like, oh, guys, we've got a new team member. And so that's going to, you know, you get to help mommy or help daddy with this and that.
• 0:12
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Another episode of 5-Minute Fatherhood. Great question from our community today, and that's from Joe, I believe it's Freudenberg, I think. Let me know if I mispronounced that wrong. But yes, great question that you brought to us. Common thing is transitioning into a growing family that's growing bigger and bigger. Yours specifically was, top tips for transitioning from two to three kids.
• 0:34
  My wife, Caitlin, is due in 10 days. Rhythms are already deteriorating as she is unable to do most cleaning, cooking, etc. We are putting plans in place for me to take on some of these things and asking for help from family, friends, but would love some additional thoughts from you guys and others in the group on how to navigate delivery. Newborn stage with two littles who still need our love and attention. Appreciate you both. Okay, great question.
• 0:58
  I'll try to give our quick rundown on how we did this. Now, basically, first thing is you have to have a plan of attack, meaning like you have to have a strategy. Don't try to just be reactive, be proactive. And it comes down to certain resources you want to deploy. If you want to dig into certain finances or not, if you want to try to save more, if it's already strapped. There's so many different ways.
• 1:16
  I'll give you ours that really helps. So we had, I would say going from two to three was the easiest for us, simply because I felt like we felt the most strategic, not because it was the easiest, but it felt like finally we got our plan right. And so a couple of things that we were ready for that did work really well. One is we were ready to,
• 1:34
  for me to really tag team and kind of divide and conquer a little bit more than usual. We're like, okay, Alyssa's on total baby duty and I'm on total toddler duty. So 99% of the time, at least for that first, I don't know, six months, like I was in charge of the two oldest kids. I was in charge of hanging out with them, taking care of them, feeding them, taking them out to the parks, making sure we had dates, et cetera. Now that's hard. I had to restructure work for that and all that. And then two, I was in charge of trying to...
• 2:02
  use any of our financial resources we had to set up the home for success, like you said, with cooking, cleaning, et cetera. So, you know, that was when we hired a house cleaner. That was when we hired someone to come help us with laundry and all these different things. And that's hard. That sounds like a luxury and it is a luxury, but it's also like, at least like I can tell you the cost of it is not anything more than pulling our, you know, cable bill off, you know, and going down on some of our data on our phone. And like, it really isn't.
• 2:28
  that much to pay someone 10 or 15 bucks an hour for a couple hours a week, um, to really do some things that can really set you up for success. Um, and yeah, and we did have to pull from that. Like, can we not do this so that we can do this? Can we not do this so we can do this? Um, and so we had to kind of allocate and change things and say no to some certain things in that season, but that really, those things, you know, the philosophy of, okay, I'm just full time in charge of the oldest so that she can attach with the baby, but also be all in, in the baby, not feel overwhelmed. Um,
• 2:57
  And then I'm also going to try to bring in as much help as I can within our resources. But I don't, and that did looking back now really, really help more than even the jump from one to two, because we weren't ready as much, et cetera. But what would you say, Jeremy? Yeah, there's a couple of things that we did in this transition as well. One was that we really, every time we had another child, we were very clear that each of the older kids needed to level up. And so we would give them more training.
• 3:25
  more jobs. Yeah. And this, so that, that's exciting. Like, Oh guys, we've got a new team member. And so that's going to, you know, you, you get to help mommy or help daddy with this and that. Um, just getting them really excited instead of having kind of the culture that we often have, which is every time a new family member comes, we're going to be dividing the scarce resources of the family, even thinner. Yeah.
• 3:47
  You know, so you're going to get less. We just flipped that narrative on its head for our kids and said, you know, we're a team and we're going to we get a new team member and we have a new challenge. And so that was big. This is also when we went from two to three, when we started to when we set aside a room in our house for someone to live with us and give us, you know, 15 to 20 hours a week of work, household assistant kind of work. And we found that that was super necessary at that stage.
• 4:16
  Um, so yeah, we had to be kind of creative. Sometimes you have to put, you know, the two older kids in one room to pull that off, or you have to think about how to do that from a housing perspective. But, um, that was something that we, we decided to do as well. But, uh, those are just some ideas. Joe, we're super excited for you and Caitlin. Can't wait for, uh, to meet, um, your, your third baby and see how this levels up your family team.
• 4:37
  Yeah. Also, you guys, too, if you go to familyteams.com, we have a really fun free resource that I think thousands of you have gotten and gone through. And it's just our family scouting report. And what that does is one page is the scouting report. Page two is like a walkthrough of how to do it. Just a quick way to really allocate.
• 4:53
  energy and focus and vision to the entire family with naming certain kids' roles and strengths and gifts and what makes them light up. And it's a really fun, easy kind of starter or primer into the family teams mentality with a really practical, actionable way to. So familyteams.com, you'll just see it like maybe in the second section down on the homepage.