Jul 07
21
Split Personality
Posted by Stephen21
Tags: children, Daniel, Debbie, Joel, problems, staying together
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At breakfast this morning Debbie volunteered to take the three boys grocery shopping. Privately I felt that this was insanity, but the weeds on the driveway were getting out of hand and we’re having lots of people over tomorrow afternoon so the lawn needed mowing. Harsh chemicals plus dangerous machinery plus small children? Best get the small children out of the equation, hence this masochistic offer.
On an unrelated tangent, we’ve had very little rain for months so the lawn doesn’t actually need mowing. It’s brown and dead and just as short as it was last time I mowed it (which was weeks ago). At the same time the weeds have grown so rapidly they almost completely obscure parts of the sidewalk (which explains the need for some serious weed-killer). Thus the mowing was more for the sake of the weeds than for the lawn. How weeds manage to flourish when everything else is dying is beyond me. But I digress.
I came in from the garden as lunch was starting. Lunch was a very solemn affair. Daniel and Joel were under strict instructions from Mum to be totally silent. Absolutely no talking allowed under any circumstances. That’s when I knew grocery shopping had not gone well.
It’s difficult to find out what happened with that kind of constraint, but as the meal progressed things relaxed and the story came out. The two boys had fought each other, kicking and screaming, the whole time they were in the grocery store. Debbie made an eternal vow to never take them shopping together again. Ever. I sighed. Why can’t the boys just get along?
This evening after supper the boys played quietly and nicely together in the sandbox for an hour. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Micah came out at one point and sat there and watched, happy as can be. All the boys in perfect harmony. For an hour. And these are the same boys? On the same day? Hard to believe.
My brother and I were the same way when we were kids. Sometimes happily playing together, but more often at each other’s throats. I still haven’t been able to figure out why (other than entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, we were brats). So I have a gloomy pessimism that this is not something my boys will grow out of in a hurry.
I wish it wasn’t like that. I wish we had happy, cooperative kids all the time. I don’t have any specific ideas on how to improve things, other than lots of patience, lots of prayer, lots of dialog (challenging with a two-year-old), and occasionally separating them into different rooms. If you have any brilliant suggestions I’d like to hear them.
By the way, I like to include a picture with every post. It brightens up the place. I try to pick something that’s related in some way to the topic, but it’s usually not a picture of the actual events described for that day. For example, the photo above was taken in April, not today. Taking pictures, picking one, tidying it up for the web, uploading it, adding caption, tags and description… It all takes time. I tend to prepare and upload pictures in batches. Perhaps it’s less timely, but it’s certainly more efficient that way.
