Aidan sitting on a rocking horse: “Paddy, when you grow up you will be a Brewer. We will play T-ball next summer.”
Paddy: “When I grow up I’m going to be a skeleton. With a SWORD. ” Runs off and comes back. “When I grow up I’m going to be a kitty. And you can all be dogs. You’re a cute dog, and you’re a cute dog….” runs off still talking and pointing to people.
Kevin, trying to play Hot Shot Golf and getting bumped for about the tenth time by a son: “you probably just messed up my statistics forever.”
This is probably representative of the whole sense of life around here these days.
Our routine is settling down into, um, a routine. One thing that is strange is that I have only four school-age kids right now. Brendan is still living at home but I’m not in charge of his education anymore and Paddy is too young.
It feels weird .. like I don’t have enough to do. Well, I don’t have as much. I was just pondering several milestones in the last year — not huge but they are significant in terms of energy output:
- Aidan and Paddy are both toilet trained, except that Aidan still needs a diaper at night. Really, this is almost the first time in two decades I have had no diapers to change. And since Paddy was born, it has been two sets of diapers, until just last year when Aidan finally got over his fear of sitting on the toilet.
- Aidan and Paddy can both go up and down stairs by themselves. WOW! This is big! For 5 plus years I had to watch Aidan like a hawk because he would head up the stairs without warning and he. Was. Not. Safe. Not with his hemiplegia and his judgement difficulties.
- Aidan and Paddy can both go in and out of the house fairly freely. Aidan’s judgement and sense of boundaries have developed remarkably in the past year and a half.
I guess the truth is that after twenty plus years, for the first time, we have no baby and/or toddler around here. It is definitely bittersweet. But the main daily effect is that I constantly have this vague feeling that I’m not challenged enough. Or that I’m not watching carefully enough. What am I going to do with all that extra peripheral vision and reflexes and that left arm strength I developed carrying the latest little one around the better part of the day while cooking or vacuuming or teaching algebra???
One of my hopes/goals for this fall was to get an opportunity to exercise regularly. So recently Kevin and I have been going on daily walks with Aidan in his wheelchair.
I think the next thing on my Project Status list is to help the little ones play more resourcefully. I see a lot of progress, but they still need much more intervention than my other kids did at those ages. Well, I remember that Sean was pretty needy still at that age. Maybe it’s because they are more extroverted?
