Magic number

There are weeks when it seems like all of my kids are doing so much and changing so fast that sparing just one day on the blog to talk about it feels woefully insufficient. And then there are weeks that seem more like holding patterns, where despite the fact that every moment of every day is full of joy and wonder there’s nevertheless a lack of major milestones, or at least a lack of thematic cohesion that easily suggests the structure of a post. This week is kind of like that. The little guy has his big year-end performance at Montessori tonight, and then exactly four more days of attendance (tomorrow, next Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday) before he says goodbye to that program forever. He’s excited enough about kindergarten (or “zero grade” as he calls it) to be pleasantly good-natured about finishing out the Montessori year (since we’ve pitched it to him as basically a pre-requisite for real school - it isn’t! but he totally doesn’t need to know that!). Yesterday our new babysitter had her first full day on the job with the little girl and the baby, and everything went happily without incident. Afterwards, as I had to get all three kids fed and put the other two to bed, the little girl had a complete meltdown (mostly wondering where mommy was, exacerbated by the fact that she is so, so very two years old right now) but I think she’s going to recover. And the baby had a nice, long uninterrupted period of deep sleep in his own bed last night, so that’s an encouraging sign of the light at the end of the newborn tunnel.

I was half-joking with a friend recently that my wife and I had just started contemplating the various things we could reintegrate into our lives as our two children got a little older, more self-sufficient, able to make overnight visits with their grandparents, &c. … and then we discovered we were expecting a third, and the clock was reset and everything not child-rearing-centric was pushed back again. And I know that’s a supremely petty way of looking at things, considering how completely enthralled we are with all of our children and how right it feels to be living that child-rearing-centric lifestyle with all three of them at the heart of it. It is funny, though, how quickly we’ve readjusted in just two short months. My wife and I never expected to have three kids, after all; early on we daydreamed about having four and later we quickly decided that two was a very sane place to stop, but three never crossed either of our minds. Still, my wife visited a few palm readers and fortune tellers in her life, who always told her that she would have three children. She generally dismissed these specific predictions as all part of the show, something that sounds good because it’s unusual. Yet here we are now, three little ones under our roof and completely unable to imagine our lives any other way. Funny, funny, funny.