Us: The Power of Three

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When Jordan was born in 1991, Hope and I looked up and found ourselves with three little people in our house all under the age of five. Now, why we did not do the math before deciding to have a third child at that particular time, I couldn't tell you. All I know is the house was suddenly smaller and a good deal louder. We had always talked about having three kids; that number, for some reason, had just felt right. Of course, talking wistfully as newlyweds is a lot different than having a serious discussion about adding a third child to the mix when you have actual evidence to apply to your argument. And  one evening one of those pieces of evidence, our daughter, while taking a bath with her brother and giving Hope and I a few minutes of rest, pooped in the tub, causing her brother to straddle the water, his feet balanced on each side of the tub, screaming, not in pain, but in disgust. It was the perfect time to say, “Yeah, let's add some more excitement to this house.”

And we did. Now, I am getting ready to share something with you that may make you hate both Hope and I, but it is germane to the topic at hand. Whenever we decided to have a baby, we got pregnant within a month. And we did this three times. Hope's dad had warned me that this was possible before I married his oldest daughter. He told me, “Jay, be careful. These Davis women are fertile. Hope's mom got pregnant every time I hung my pants on the bed post.” At first I figured he was giving me veiled warnings against premarital sex (which worked), but it was later that his words became prophetic. And it was those words, combined with experience, that caused Hope and I to both get fixed after Jordan was born. We weren't taking any chances.

Part of the reason we wanted to have three children was that I come from a long line of threes. My dad was the oldest of three (boy, girl, boy) and I was the oldest in my nuclear crew of three (boy, girl, boy). The odds of Hope and I doing the same thing with the same birth order was, well, I have no idea, but it had to be a safe bet that something in there would be different. But we ended up pulling the hat trick of hat tricks and finished off our family with the third boy, girl, boy sequence in a row. (Note: Hope came from a family of four kids so she had to imagine that everything I was saying about the Power of Three and any other nonsense in this arena was of value and worth listening to. I always took her head nodding and glassy stare as silent agreement, never once considering she was thinking of her happy place and tuning me out.)

We have often talked about that decision. There were times during Jordan's middle and high school days when we talked about it a little more than we probably should have. But, we also talk about what our world would be like without Jordan. The powerful mix of William, Laura and Jordan was exactly what Hope and I needed and, I believe, what God intended. Three distinct personalities requiring three distinct parenting styles and three distinct levels of prayer. Plus, without Jordan, Laura would have never suffered payback for her early bathtub antics because Jordan took care of that when he pooped in the tub while taking a bath with her.