Photography from iStockphoto.com

I blamed it on the full moon. The tossing, the turning, the endless game of musical beds being played without enthusiasm by my husband, our six-year-old and me. Her growing pains. The cat meowing some unknown warning at some unseen subject. It was a perfectly awful set of circumstances converging on us the way sleep should have.

And the terribly awful night turned into a terribly awful morning. The alarm sounded despite our protests; the children had to be fed, dressed and readied for school despite our sluggish movements. We did not talk to each other so much as grunt instructions and respond with surly, monosyllabic indications that we were not yet in the mood for pleasant interaction. We were tired. Very tired. And just like that, in a sleep-deprived, pre-coffee, hella-grumpy moment, I knew one thing for certain:

My baby lust was cured. For good.

Practically speaking, my baby lust should have dissipated some time between my husband’s vasectomy three years ago and our sleepless night this week, but there had always been a flicker of want left in my uterus/heart/brain. Pair a winding-down biological clock, ticking out in desperation, “Not much time left!” with the birth of several of my friends’ third (or fourth) child, and there were moments when I actually regretted the adamancy with which I had always broadcast the intention that, TWO. We are having TWO.

But I am done. There’s no way I could go through upwards of another entire year of sleep deprivation—even if the cause of it was the cutest, cuddliest baby in the universe.

The first time around, I was good at sleep deprivation. We co-slept, nursed on demand round the clock, and unified our schedules, my baby and me. I was OK. With the birth of our second, two years later, I followed the same tenants of baby-rearing, but the sleep deprivation took more of a toll—owing, I’m sure, to the busy, needy toddler that cared not if I had slept only four hours the night before. But we managed, mostly happily.

For a couple of years after that, I was sure we could do it again. Sure that I could be tired for a while longer, sure that a baby would fit right in to our busy household.

But now, my kids are four and six. They sleep through the night, usually not in my bed, and they can even fend for themselves for a time in the morning, allowing us to wring the very last drops of sleep from the night. We have a certain amount of freedom, and once my youngest can wipe her own bum, I will have reached the Shangri-La of early motherhood.

And now I know—for me, there’s no looking back. It’s not even bittersweet anymore, like the coffee rushing through my fatigue-addled body that morning. It’s simply right.

Are you done having kids? How did you know?

Karen Green recently traded life in the biggest city in Canada for life in the biggest cornfield in Canada. Freed from her full-time job as a writer and editor, Karen now spends her time…writing and editing. And frolicking in the leaves with her two small girls. Karen is a speaker, the founder of Mom The Vote and the author of the blog, The Kids Are Alright, where she has been writing about the humorous and poignant moments of family life since 2005. She is thrilled to be a part of canadianfamily.ca.