Congratulations — and welcome to the three-kids club. As a proud father who has just done the hat-trick, you will now be stretched like a hare’s hamstring.
You’ll find that when you’ve got three, you and your wife are outnumbered.
For the next few months, if not years, you will feel like one of those circus performers spinning plates.
Three’s trouble: The Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William emerged from the Lindo Wing with their new son at about 6pm
Just when you think one child has quietened, another will start wailing. One potty crisis is overcome — only for one of your two other angels to have an eruption.
But talking of that sort of thing, your nappy-changing will reach another level.
When you are burnishing their bottoms and fixing new nappies, you will learn to work as fast as Formula 1 mechanics in the Grand Prix pits.
Sleep? Ha! With three, you can probably forget about that for the foreseeable future.
Feeding times will start to resemble a custard pie fight in a Laurel and Hardy film. Dads being regarded as general dustbins, you will have to choke down all those cold, uneaten chicken nuggets and fish fingers — and, ugh, those peach Petits Filous yoghurt jobs, which the children always refuse to touch. You will put on some weight.
With three of them bouncing around KP, you will forget their birthdays, forget to pick them up from school, forget their names, even. I used to be incredulous when my own father called me by my brother’s or one of my two sisters’ names. When I became a dad of three, I was soon doing the same.
I know you will have some paid help, but I can see that you are both essentially hands-on parents.
With three of them bouncing around KP, you will forget their birthdays, forget to pick them up from school, forget their names, even
Car travel, already a nightmare with biscuit crumbs and dropped milk bottles and furry, month-old Skittles and projectile vomit in the back seat on hot days, now becomes even worse.
When there were just two, you could fit their child seats (fiendishly fiddlesome things) in the back of the family speedster alongside one another.
Now, it’s going to be goodbye to that sleek Range Rover Evoque and hello to a Ford or Renault people carrier. Sorry, sir, but that dashing Ducati motorbike of yours will be mothballed in the garage for the foreseeable.
Trips to the local funfair in Norfolk without Mum while she has a snooze? With two, you can strap one child either side of you on the merry-go-round.
Now, you’ll have to leave one in the push-chair at the side of the ride — and risk being reported to social services for child abandonment by some passing busybody.
But maybe you can get one of your Special Branch officers to look after whichever prince or princess is sitting out the ride.
‘Juggling’ is when you have three balls or more. Before that it’s just passing two objects from hand to hand.
With two children, you and your wife can both carry one when they’re tired. Now someone is going to have to walk. Young Prince George may take this news badly.
As a father of three, you soon become adept at bribing one of the older two to accept life’s cruel realities. George’s piggybank could well prosper.
Our youngest, Honor, was born in 2003 when her siblings Claud and Eveleen were five and four.
Princess Charlotte waved as she was taken into the Lindo Wing with her father, Prince William, and brother, Prince George, to be introduced to her new brother
On shopping trips, when my wife was at home, I once absent-mindedly left Honor in the car while I took the older two into the supermarket. My sleep-deprived brain forgot that we now had three little munchkins. At bathtime, unless you’re superbly attentive, there is now a strong danger that one of the little loves may well sink beneath the Matey-bubbled waves — glug glug glug. I sometimes wondered if I should make them wear armbands in the bath.
Carrying two upstairs to bed can be easily done. With three, be prepared to rick your back.
Good luck with thinking of names, too (particularly given how many Christian names you Windsors give one another).
Deciding on godparents can also be tricky by this point (there’s always Donald Trump I suppose). You have already used the suitable ones. Do you really dare ask that boozy friend with whom you used to enjoy hog-whimpering nights at university in St Andrews?
The moment at Christenings when your old drinking buddies are asked to renounce sin is always an interesting one.
The truth is that a third child goes virtually ignored.
Experience has by now numbed all the parental terrors that flood your mind when you become a parent for the first or even the second time.
So number three tends to be left outside in its pram, even in a blizzard (as a fifth child myself, I know about these things). When it comes to bedtime stories, the youngest is not read lovely baby tales like AA Milne’s poetry or the Hairy Maclary books.
It has to put up with more lurid fare — perhaps the Marvel comics the older two have moved on to.
As for TV viewing, instead of something gentle on Cbeebies, your youngest will likely grow up watching the more advanced programmes your first two like. We once found Honor, when she was a toddler, gurgling away while she was watching someone being stabbed on the telly (Claud had found something thoroughly unsuitable to watch; he used to scream with laughter when villains met a gory end).
When Honor was eight she trailed into our bedroom one morning holding a copy of her older brother’s ‘Nuts’ magazine (complete with some photographs of young women who had forgotten to put their pyjamas on), and suggested that maybe we should buy Claud some pornography for his next birthday present.
You’ll come up for air in about ten years’ time and realise it was all worthwhile, writes LETTS
Such was her relative innocence at the time that in her next breath she asked if the tooth fairy was going to visit when her next tooth came out.
Also, when you have three, intelligence about the tooth fairy and Father Christmas becomes more difficult to control.
Your new son will therefore possibly have a more accelerated childhood — and have to put up with wearing third-hand clothes, and sometimes suck third-hand fruit gums.
It can be a challenge to stop the older two sticking their fingers up his nostrils, or trying to feed him rabbit droppings from the garden (‘chocolate drops!’).
But Princess Charlotte will be sweetly excited and will want to help, so the baby will in some ways have two mothers.
As a father of three, you will often feel jaded. The novelty has gone. Apparently I stayed in the maternity ward in Hereford for less than half an hour when number three arrived, and then went back to work.
I’ve a nasty feeling that’s true, though I cannot clearly remember.
The weariness assails you.
Your eyes will develop not just bags but suitcases. You will go even balder. And your wife, by now a member of the walking wounded because she is so tired, may talk to you as if you were a fourth toddler.
But bear this comfort in mind. Our third has been, so far, the most uncomplicated. And they are all a great gift, and such different characters. Three’s company. Three’s fun.
You’ll come up for air in about ten years’ time and realise it was all worthwhile.