Rihanna New Baby: What Having Three Under Four Actually Means

I was standing in line at the local H-E-B last week with a cart full of clearance diapers and a toddler actively licking the shopping cart handle, when the cashier decided to lean over and tell me I really needed to space my kids out more for my own sanity. Before I could even blink, the older woman behind me in line tapped my shoulder to say I actually should have had them even closer together so they'd be built-in best friends, and right at that exact second, my phone buzzed with a text from my mom telling me to drink a massive glass of milk because my teeth were going to fall out from being pregnant so much. That's the magical reality of popping out three kids in less than five years. You just become public property. Everyone has an opinion on your uterus and your calendar.

So when my group chat absolutely exploded over the news that the Fenty empire was expanding again, I just had to laugh. The whole internet is obsessed with the pop star's latest little one joining brothers RZA and Riot. People are looking at those glossy magazine shoots and wondering how a billionaire is going to manage three kids stacked basically back-to-back. Let me just tell you, as a rural Texas mom whose bank account and wardrobe look very, very different from a global superstar's, I actually feel a deep, exhausted solidarity with her right now. A fresh infant combined with two feral toddlers running around the house is a highly specific kind of circus that money can't entirely fix. You're still just a person trapped on a couch trying to figure out how to keep three tiny humans alive until bedtime.

Stacking kids like cordwood

There's this wild rumor going around that having your babies close together is a fun, cute way to get the diaper years over with fast. I'm just gonna be real with you, having three under four is physically humbling in a way I can't even describe. When I was pregnant with my third, my doctor looked at my chart, did the math on my last delivery, and basically just sighed into his clipboard while telling me to swallow double my prenatal vitamins and pray my pelvic floor holds up. I guess the World Health Organization and all those big medical groups think you're supposed to wait something like 18 to 24 months between pregnancies so your body doesn't completely fall apart and turn to dust, because apparently, it takes a long time to replace all the vitamins a baby sucks out of you. But life happens, and sometimes you just find yourself staring at two pink lines while you're still nursing a one-year-old.

The only way you survive this phase is pure, unadulterated containment. You have to find safe places to trap one child while you deal with the bodily fluids of another. When I'm trying to pack up my Etsy shop orders w baby strapped to my chest in a carrier, I need the two-year-old to not be coloring on my shipping labels or trying to ride the family dog. We rely heavily on babywearing, but you also just need a designated spot on the floor where a new baby won't get accidentally trampled by a rogue tricycle.

For my second kid, we ended up getting the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys after my sister swore by it. I'll shoot straight with you—it's not a magical babysitter that will keep your infant quiet for an hour while you meal prep. It's just a really pretty, sturdy arch with some cute hanging wooden shapes that distracts them for exactly seven minutes while I switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. I do appreciate that it's not made of screaming neon plastic that sings off-key songs to haunt my nightmares, and because it's wood, the toddlers haven't managed to snap it in half yet. It's a nice boundary marker. The older kids know that when the baby is under the wooden arch, they've to walk around it, and honestly, that visual cue alone is worth the price tag.

Keeping the oldest from starting a mutiny

I read an interview where the singer mentioned her oldest boy having a really hard time understanding his new role when his little brother was born, and honey, I felt that in my bones. When we brought our second baby home, my oldest realized the potato-sack infant was actually staying permanently, and he completely lost his mind. He turned into a feral barn cat overnight. He started demanding a pacifier after being weaned off it for a year, he threw his plate of spaghetti at the kitchen wall, and one afternoon I caught him actively trying to pack his Paw Patrol suitcase to run away to his grandmother's house.

My pediatrician mentioned something about behavioral regressions being totally normal when a new sibling enters the picture because their entire universe just got flipped upside down and shaken out. I think we expect these toddlers to suddenly act like mature little adults just because a smaller baby arrived, but their brains just aren't cooked enough for that. Instead of forcing them to share every single toy right away and demanding they be the perfect big sibling while constantly reminding them to use gentle hands and quiet voices, I just started handing my oldest a pack of wipes and telling him he was my boss.

Giving him a job saved my sanity. I'd act entirely incompetent and tell him I couldn't possibly change a diaper without his expert help. It distracted him from his jealousy long enough to make him feel important.

Speaking of diapers, my oldest was my absolute cautionary tale for everything, especially baby clothes. Because I was a broke first-time mom, I bought all the cheap, stiff synthetic outfits from the big box stores, thinking a onesie is just a onesie. Bless his heart, he broke out in full-body red eczema patches that kept us up crying for months. By the time the next babies rolled around, I stopped wasting money on the cheap stuff and bought the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao. Yes, the price point is higher than a shrink-wrapped five-pack at the grocery store, but I’m telling y'all, this thing is completely indestructible and worth its weight in gold. It survived my second kid's explosive newborn blowout phase, it survived the third kid's chronic spit-up phase, and the neckline honestly stretches over their giant heads without that horrible tight squeak that makes babies scream. It breathes, it washes completely clean without holding onto weird smells, and it doesn't give my kids rashy shoulders. I just buy one in every size and rotate them.

If you're building a registry right now and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of junk the baby industry tries to sell you, do yourself a favor and look at Kianao's organic baby blankets and clothes. Stick to natural fibers from the start, and you'll save yourself so many late-night pharmacy runs for hydrocortisone cream.

Creepy cameras and internet footprints

Now, obviously, I don't have paparazzi hiding in the bushes outside my house in rural Texas. I'm not dealing with photographers trying to snap pictures of my kids at the park. But I do have a mother-in-law with an iPad who absolutely loves Facebook, and that comes with its own brand of terror.

This whole celebrity conversation about protecting kids from cameras has made me completely reevaluate what I post online. A friend of mine who works in tech came over for coffee a while back and told me all this terrifying stuff about digital identity theft and how kids' photos get scraped by weird AI bots to be used in ways I don't even want to type out. It completely freaked me out. I guess child psychologists are starting to warn people that kids who grow up with their entire lives documented online can end up really stressed out and resentful when they realize they never consented to having their potty training journey broadcasted to their mom's five hundred followers.

I ended up going through my entire social media feed and scrubbing it. I took down anything showing their faces straight-on, and I had a very blunt, incredibly uncomfortable conversation with our extended family about not posting the kids without asking me first. It caused some drama, but the internet is written in ink, not pencil. My oldest son doesn't need his naked bathtub photos from 2021 floating around the web for his future high school girlfriend or employer to find. If a mega-star can manage to hide her babies' faces from the entire global media machine, I can definitely tell my aunt to stop live-streaming our family picnics.

Rubbing oil on a stretched out stomach

Every time a celebrity has a baby, magazines love to run these glowing articles about how the star is just embracing her changing body and celebrating her curves. Look, I'm glad they feel that way, but they also have personal chefs, on-call massage therapists, and private trainers. I'm just a regular person, and I'll readily admit that I sat in a Target dressing room at seven months pregnant and cried into a pile of maternity jeans because nothing fit and my thighs were chafing.

The physical stretching of your skin when you're growing your second or third baby is no joke. The itching alone is enough to make you completely lose your mind. I think the medical consensus is that stretch marks are mostly just genetic and there's not a whole lot you can do if your skin decides to tear under the pressure. But my grandma always told me to grease up like a Thanksgiving turkey every single night anyway, just to stop the miserable itching.

I think the real trick is just finding things that make your weird, stretched-out, leaking postpartum body feel a little bit better. Someone from my church gifted us the Bamboo Baby Blanket | Hypoallergenic Organic | Blue Floral Pattern when my youngest was born. I'll be honest, the blue floral pattern is a little formal for my highly chaotic, muddy-boots lifestyle, and the white background shows pureed sweet potatoes almost instantly if the baby sneezes. But the actual fabric is stupidly soft. It feels like cold water on your skin. Bamboo naturally cools you down, which is a massive blessing because I sweat like a sinner in church during those postpartum hormone drops. I mostly just drape it over my ugly rocking chair and use it for myself when I'm stuck feeding the baby at three in the morning and need something breathable over my shoulders.

You really don't need a billionaire's unlimited budget to treat your babies' skin right or to survive the absolute madness of having multiple toddlers running the asylum. You just need a sense of humor, rock-solid boundaries with your extended family, and a few hardworking items that won't fall apart in the wash. If you want to build a stash of clothes that will genuinely survive being handed down through three kids, go check out the full line of Kianao's organic baby clothes and find the heavy lifters your diaper bag is begging for.

Things Nobody Tells You (But I Will)

Are close age gaps seriously as hard as everyone says?

Yes and no. The first year of having a newborn and a young toddler is a special kind of survival mode where you'll drink cold coffee and forget your own name. It's incredibly physically taxing on the mother's body. But once the youngest hits about eighteen months and they start really playing together instead of just stealing toys from each other, it gets really fun. You're already in the diaper-changing, sleep-deprived trench anyway, so you might as well just get it all done in one agonizing swoop.

How do I stop my toddler from hating the new baby?

You can't force them to love the baby right away, so take that pressure off yourself. The biggest thing I learned was to stop blaming the infant for everything. Instead of saying "I can't play with you right now, I've to feed the baby," I started saying "My hands are busy right now, but I can play blocks in five minutes." It takes the target off the newborn's back. And give them a job! Toddlers love bossing people around, so let them be the official diaper-fetcher.

Do I really need to hide my kid's face on Instagram?

I'm not going to tell you how to run your own social media, but I'll say that the internet is a very weird place right now. You don't know where those photos are going once they leave your page. I personally stick to pictures of the backs of their heads, or them looking away from the camera. At the very least, lock your account down to private and strip the location data off your posts so people don't know what park you visit every Tuesday.

What's the one clothing item you honestly need for a newborn?

A high-quality, stretchy, organic cotton sleeveless bodysuit. Don't buy the stiff ones that have zero give. You want something that you can pull down over their shoulders when they've a massive blowout, rather than trying to drag a poop-covered collar over their face and into their hair. Spend a few extra dollars on a good brand that handles hot water washing without shrinking into a doll shirt.

Does belly oil really stop stretch marks?

Honestly? Probably not. If your mom and grandma got stretch marks, you're probably going to get them too, no matter how much expensive cream you slather on your stomach. But rubbing oil or heavy body butter on your belly every night feels good, it forces you to take five minutes for yourself, and it absolutely stops that horrible tight, itchy feeling when your skin is expanding in the third trimester. Buy it for the comfort, not for the miracle cure.