A year or so ago when W was approaching his second birthday and I was just entering my second trimester with J, I really wondered what it would be like to have four small children. Now I know. It has its ups and downs and there are some days when I dream for a minute or two of sending some of them to school. There are days when cleaning up (or having them clean up) one more time seems like it will kill me.
The truth is though that they are all getting older and they are more and more capable. Really at this point I only have two small children, a kindergardener, and a big boy. For instance this morning they all came tromping into our room for a snuggle. I was not more than a quarter awake and J clearly wanted to get up and play. So F very competently carried his little brother off to his room to play so that I could sleep.
Some mornings he wakes up and reads to W until we wake up. We go peak in their door and see them sitting on the bed reading together (F reads and W holds “Bear” on his lap to listen).
Su too is growing up. She is at that stage of being a big girl one day and a preschooler the next. When she’s in “big girl” mode she is competent and capable, and then she gets tired and reverts to whining. Oh, the drama! She is almost five now though and I know that soon there will be many fewer things that she finds overwhelming and (hopefully) the drama will decrease.
Even “Bull” (as we call W) is growing into a “useful around the kitchen” sort of a chap. He empties the dishwasher and fetches potatoes and onions from the crate in the playroom. Yesterday we discovered that he is tall enough to put the frozen vegetables in the chest freezer if someone else opens and closes it.
A few years ago when F was two and Su one and W was not quite born an older mother told me that things would probably be wild for a while but they would get easier as the children grew older. She was right.