As I am writing these words, my daughters are arranging several doll-sized toilets under my chair.

It’s a bathroom for their Barbie doll day care, which has filled nearly every other surface of our dining room. There are shoeboxes full of paper towel cots, tables covered with chocolate chips and a minefield of miniature playground equipment. Alarmingly, one of them brought in a tray of dirty snow and dyed it red with maraschino cherry juice.

This is life with three children: chaotic, messy, sticky. Our front porch is stained with purple slime. There is much laundry. So many emotions! So many people talking at once.

But also I could not feel more lucky that I get to love three people this much.

Let me be clear: I am not trying to urge others to have a big or slightly-bigger-than-average family. I firmly believe that parenting is a vocation, a call you hear or you don’t. The size of your family is a deeply personal choice; I am certainly no pronatalist.

What I am writing is a love letter to these kids and this life. This is a thank you note to the universe for allowing me to witness and facilitate these three people becoming themselves.

From the first week we began dating, my husband and I knew we wanted to have at least two children.

But bringing the first into the world was an ordeal. Our son arrived after 42 weeks of pregnancy, eight hours of labor, four hours of pushing and an emergency C-section that led to him spending a week in the NICU.

Amid the chaos, a transformative wave of love washed over me. I watched worshipfully as smiles flitted across my son’s sleeping face. I loved him with a depth and ferocity I had never before experienced.

As he grew, I loved listening to him tell stories and push his little walker up the sidewalk, waving to the neighbors on their porches. Each new skill he mastered seemed more miraculous than the last.

But I worried that all this hovering would not be healthy for our son. Plus, he liked the idea of having a sibling. And I missed having a little baby head to nuzzle.

Throughout my second pregnancy, I fretted that I couldn’t possibly love our second as much as I loved my son; surely it was impossible to love two people that much.

Then my daughter emerged as 6 pounds, 14 ounces of main character energy. She captivated every passing stranger in the grocery store. She played jokes on me while nursing. She interrupted her brother with animated baby talk.

And I adored her, every bit as much as I loved my son. She was just as magical, a shooting star come to earth. The same feral devotion swelled inside me.

I left my full-time reporting job to freelance and take care of them. Our days were filled with diapers and nursing and library story times and playground trips. There were so many tantrums, so many tears.

Yet it was amazing to see two people I DIY’ed (with help from my husband) interact with each other. My son, then 2.5, explained the intricacies of firefighting and defeating bad guys to his baby sister, who he called Sister Baby. She found everything he said funny, including when he called her “Diarrhea Diarrhea Stinkyface Poopyhead.”

My second birth also was no picnic — ask me about the ambulance ride some time — so I leaned toward retiring from the baby-making business.

But before I could make up my mind, my uterus made the decision for me. (According to my very unscientific research, most third children are surprises.)

Once I accepted the idea of spending more years tethered to a baby, I began to fall in love with this third child, who felt like a ray of sunshine in the womb. Confident she would be my last, I savored pregnancy for the first time.

“Where shall we get lunch today?” I would ask her, patting my giant belly, before waddling off to the Indian buffet.

My third was just as delightful after birth. She is naturally thoughtful and kind. Bright, creative and easygoing. Her older sister’s favorite playmate.

But the period I now think of as The Onslaught of Babies was intense. So many little shoes! Three people to get in and out of car seats. Three people to demand elaborate snacks and not eat them. Three people waking up in the night.

From the beginning, it was wonderful to see the older two, then 5 and 2.5, taking care of the youngest. My son, a natural teacher and leader, was kind and patient with his little sisters. One spring day a few weeks after she was born, my son tapped out a song on a xylophone and my daughter twirled in a pink tutu as the baby giggled. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

As my third grew, I got to witness the magic of the three of them interacting — creating, imagining, negotiating. During the pandemic they convinced themselves they had magic powers. One December morning, they all reported hearing Santa overnight. More recently, they formed a band and wrote songs to perform together.

Don’t get me wrong: The level of chaos here is intense. The kids get into fights over absolutely nothing; the girls punched each other over a paper towel the other day. One time they took down a bag of sugar, sprinkled it on the floor and rolled in it.

Life with three kids is a bit like the garden I plant carefully each spring that turns into a riot of weeds and overgrown tomato plants by July. Chaotic and not-quite-what-I-planned, but productive and bursting with life.

“There is always so much joy and love and chaos,” Rebecca Dezube, a Keswick physician told me about life with her four kids. “I’m always kept on my toes.”

For me, the most overwhelming part is handling three sets of emotions. Everyone here wants attention at the same time, whether it’s my oldest stressing about algebra, my middle wanting me to listen to a story she wrote or my youngest handing me her latest painting.

Having multiple kids is a logistical challenge, Dezube said. Her family is only able to navigate it because her husband is an equal partner in all aspects of caring for the kids.

It can also be hard to get one-on-one time with each child. As Carolyn Graf, a mother of four from Ruxton explained to me, “My days of playing with my kids are pretty limited. You have each other. I *made* friends for you.”

Another downside to having a bigger family is that money is always tight. If we had one child, we could sign them up for all the lessons and take them on all the trips. But their childhoods are a little leaner, a little less-structured.

But the tradeoff — I hope — is that our children have a pair of best friends for life. I hope they’ll have each others’ backs and delight in each others’ company, reminisce about rolling around on the floor covered in sugar.

I hope they’ll carry with them this sense of love and connection, this chaotic, joyful garden, for the rest of their lives.