The Playtime Catalyst

     "Come on! Let's go play!"

     These words, that I heard from my sons mouth to my daughter when breakfast was over, were sweet music to my ears. There is a three and a half year age gap between these two which is enough time for my sweet boy to remember life before baby girl and also to clearly remember her as a tiny baby. I have been wondering for a few months now when my sweet boy would look at his baby sister, who is now two years old and ready to play with her 'brubah', and realize 'Hey, she is a kid too!' In other words, some one he can actually play with. Most of their playtime interaction, until just recently was brother doing something, baby girl watching him, then annoying him as she tried to imitate it. There was a whole period of time where her MO was to stick legos in her mouth just to see him have a conniption over it.

     It seems that we found our catalyst in the new arrival that graced our lives last month. Our little prince arrived about a month ago and the change was immediate. Some of it may have been that my husband and I seem to divide our children up into categories according to mobility when we are carting them from place to place. For example: I take the one in the infant carrier, you take the two that can walk. But how much of a hand the adults had in this change isn't really important, what is important is that something about seeing a tiny baby seems to have sparked a comparison in my sons brain and he now sees our (not so)baby girl as a playmate instead of some thing to play around.

     He has always been good about helping her do things like wash her hands and get unbuckled but now they also color together, make ridiculous noises at one another at entirely inappropriate times, and the world revolves around making one another laugh. This has been wonderful for her development. Her vocabulary and sentence structure has taken huge leaps, her attention span is a little longer, and she tracks conversations much better. Much of this is probably from needing to learn how to tattle on what her big brother has put her through, he still forgets at times that she is smaller than him and can be a little too rough with her. She seems to have surmised that tears with give you kisses and sympathy but perhaps words will result in vengeance on her persecutor/helper.

     The sweet moments, in between tattling, tears and screams, when I hear the joyful bangs, happy screams and mystery thuds emanating from their room, are music to my ears. Next year my sweet boy will be in kindergarten so these precious days together will become fewer and further between. I know that she will miss her big brother terribly when she is stuck with me and the not nearly as interesting little prince.

     In my mind it all comes down to something I told my children when they were fussing at one another the other day:

     Your siblings will always be there, they will always love you just because you are you, and the bond between brothers and sisters is very special and never goes away. Being part of a family is hard, and being part of a bigger family takes even more cooperation and effort from everyone, you all have to pitch in to make things work. But the bigger the family the more people there are in this world to love you from the first moment you exist.