With my baby now 13-months-old, I should have seen it coming.

Heck, I’m surprised it took this long.

But it hit me like a wallop when I was checking out at Costco with the whole family in tow.

“Oh, they are so cute!” the cashier said. “When are you going to have another one?”

My husband was nervously wriggling and I was reaching for the receipt before it had even finished printing.

I did not want to answer that question. Especially not right now.

The Navy changed plans on us, recently. And, like we always do, we adjusted our year a bit. We mourned what my husband would miss and celebrated what times we could anticipate he would be home. It was nothing new.

And then, we realized what the Navy’s new plan for my husband’s deployment schedule would really mean.

Baby No. 3 was in limbo.

Our second child was a sweet surprise. My two girls are only 20 months apart, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but it was a lot to handle this past year - mostly because I was alone.

So our baby wasn’t but five-months-old – when I told my husband, “We need more time before we have another baby.”

I am a planner by nature, and though the Navy has given me a lot more flexibility than I knew I possessed, I want to at least attempt to make a smoother transition growing into a family of five than we did into a family of four.

And everything seemed to be leaning that way. And then plans changed.

Now, we are faced with the decision of when to get pregnant. Do we push things up a bit? Get pregnant before we’re ready? Have a baby before I feel safer and more secure and more ready?

Or do we wait? And until when? Till he comes home?  Wait till both girls are older?  Older than I wanted them to be, if I’m being honest.

And it’s not just that. If we wait, we run into the chance of moving with a very new newborn. Possibly overseas. At which point, when I start thinking about it, I get woozy and disoriented because, well, the sheer thought of it makes my blood pressure rise.

So we are quite clearly stuck between a rock and a no-good-time-to-make-a-baby place.

And we have no good answer for the tumult of people that seem to be asking that dreaded question, all of a sudden.

Because it’s not just Mommy and Daddy that need to be taken into account when planning for another child.

The Navy plays a big role, too. The biggest, in fact.

It should be as simple as the birds and the bees. But with a military family, it’s anything but.