Monday, September 20, 2010

Kids... The evolving gift


It really is the truth that if you had 10 kids.... or 19 kids and counting, they would each one be different. It always amazes me how you can speak to adult siblings, raised in the same house, by the same parents and yet the vision of their childhoods seem totally different. I guess it's not so much how you're raised, but how you view how you were raised. Because of the age difference between my first two children and my third, it's been like having two separate families. My youngest child has practically been an only child. Both his brother and sister have been out of the house for several years. The difference between the two families are just amazing. When my first two were growing up, there was constant fussing, fighting, you know the typical... "She's looking at me!" scenario. The house definitely had more of a high energy vibe to it back then. I thought my second child was going to be the quiet one, for about two days till I got him home. So when number three came along I reserved judgement on what he would be like, cause you just never can tell. He actually is my quiet one. People often say "Oh, I bet he's not that quiet at home." and I tell them "Oh yeah, he is that quiet at home." But the curious difference between him and the first two are his organizational skills and somewhat OCD ability to have a place for everything and have everything in it's place. The other day when he was gone the dogs got his door opened and went into his room. They rumpled the covers a little before I shewed them out. I straightened everything so he wouldn't know. He hates for them to be in there and doesn't like anything moved..... ANYTHING! He came home, walked straight into his room and right back out again. "Mom, were the dogs in my room?" I told him they were but I ran them out and they didn't mess anything up.I asked him how he could tell they had been in there... "I could just tell." He said.  "I don't like them in here." That just cracked me up. This weekend I was cleaning house and I went in his room to vacuum and mop. Except for a few little dust bunnies, his room was spotless... SPOTLESS! When my older kids lived at home, I never worried about vacuuming their rooms because I couldn't see the floor to know if it needed vacuuming! As teenagers,  their room was their space and I allowed them to keep it (or not keep it) anyway they wanted it (it wasn't usually pretty). Amazingly they have both turned into nice tidy adults, so I guess that means I wasn't the WORST Mom ever (there's that refrigerator Mom you may have heard of). I don't mind being honest and saying that any neat genes they got, came from their Father. I've always wished I had just a tiny bit of anal in me, but it just wasn't to be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a slob.... I'm just very relaxed. When I look at my kids I see a refreshing mixture of my husband and I with a heavy dose of originality in each one of them. I think that is what makes parenting so much fun... It's like a gift that has layers and layers of wrapping and as each layer is unwrapped the gift just keeps evolving making being a parent a process that never gets boring.

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