You are here  The Right Way to Space Siblings (For You)   When
my daughter was a few months old, I came up with a line about
when my husband and I would have a second child: "I want Sylvia
to be old enough to pay attention when I say, 'Wait right here
while I change the baby's diaper.'?" Four years old seemed about
right.  But by the time Sylvia was 2, I was hearing something
else from my husband, Aron. "Did you see how nicely so-and-so
and so-and-so were playing together?" he'd say after spending
time with close-in-age siblings. "If we wait until she's four,
we'll be out of this" (at which he'd gesture to the pull-up
diapers piled next to the potty and the mac and cheese cemented
on the high-chair straps) "and it'll be hard to come back.
Really hard."  So Lena was born three years and three months
after Sylvia. And, of course, we're thrilled with the spacing,
since we now can't imagine our girls any other way. And yet I
still wonder: Would Sylvia's difficult threes have been so
difficult if Lena had been bor