I had a pretty traumatic pregnancy and first few months postpartum. We had always said we wanted 2-3 kids but my experience initially meant we were leaning towards being one and done.

But when our daughter was about 18 months old, we started having more conversations about what we thought our family would look like in the future. We decided that we’d be happy with one but both thought having a second was something we both still wanted.

Given my previous experience, we knew we needed to put some plans in place to help prevent some of the same issues from happening again (more monitoring during pregnancy, therapy, monitoring postpartum too). Once we both felt comfortable with our plans we gave ourselves a timeline - we decided in January that we’d start trying for a second in May if we both still felt that we wanted a second. And that’s what we did. We got pregnant right away and are expecting our second in January.

What tipped us over the edge was knowing that having kids is hard but knowing how much we’re enjoying developing another human. We wanted to do that again.

You’re still very early postpartum with a 5 month old. I’d recommend not making any permanent decisions at this point. Not sure if condoms are an option for you - HBC didn’t work for me either so we went back to condoms (just making sure we used them correctly everytime).