While taking a break from the mayhem that tends to unfold throughout our house between 7am and 7pm each day, I thought it might be worth looking back at our first weeks as parents.
Life has changed out of all recognition. Any concept of personal space or time while in the house during the day (at least at the moment) has gone. While writing this, two of our children are running from room to room - apparently the youngest is a dragon of sorts, and roaring appropriately. This is normal.
As I have mentioned previously, being just “me and W” seems like a very long time ago now… and that happened very quickly. It would be wrong to say we miss it, but we do each have our tired moments while dealing with the various daily activities - thankfully we know each other very well indeed, so tend to catch each other.
This morning has been the first one where I slept in - not tipping myself out of bed until 8am. Such extravagances are rare in our new life as parents.
The children’s attempts to bend us to their will are becoming both more obvious, and more humorous. I know we shouldn’t laugh when they are upset, but when they are obvious crocodile tears, or attempts to get their siblings into trouble, we can’t help but admire their first forays into deception and deceit.
The parenting books we were given for christmas by friends have not so much been a guide, as a validation that we are doing the right things already. The two years we spent reading, attending various courses and being grilled by social workers were not in vain.
Tomorrow marks a huge change in our routine so far - the eldest will start going to school. She has been growing slowly more difficult to deal with over the last week - asking for things now, and sulking if they don’t happen as requested (they never do - we make sure of it). She has spent quite a bit of time in her room the last few days reflecting on it while I walked away smiling.
Hopefully school will give her more structure, more direction, and fill her head more than we can at present. She really needs to spend lots of time with children of her own age now. She needs to win and lose friends - to learn the consequences of her actions.
The middle child has been the most insecure so far, and it has shown through her various mood swings, clinginess, and tears. She is a parrot, and everybody’s shadow. Whatever the others might have, she “wants” or “needs”. We have started to ignore “want” and “need” - to enforce “would like”, or “please may I have”, accompanied by “thankyou”. It’s slowly working - but depends on our constant re-enforcement.
The youngest is away with the fairies most of the time - and is also the most able to amuse herself. When faced with free time, we very much have to lead the older children - feeding them with ideas constantly. The youngest will quite happily find her own activities - although most of the time they seem to consist of getting things out and putting them away again without actually playing with them.
So far I privately think we’re doing quite well. How we make the transition to the school run over the coming days is another unknown though, so it will be interesting to see how that goes.