Three kids and a couple of mooks

The other day I was visiting a young mom who has three kids under the age of six. Her youngest, an adorable bulldozer of a child, did a face-plant on the back patio and came up howling, blood spurting from his punctured lip. The mom scooped him up, checked him out for damage, didn't find anything too serious, gave him a hug and a quick cuddle, and sent him on his way. The kid's sobs by now had died down--other than the shock of the fall, and a wee split in his lip, there was no real damage, so he toddled back into the yard, intent on finding whatever it is that two-year-olds hunt so assiduously. Meanwhile, the mom calmly went to the kitchen sink, piled high with the dishes of two meals she hadn't had time to deal with yet, and scrubbed the blood off her arms with the dishrag.

I told her I loved her parenting style. And I meant it--she was so calm, so unflappable. Now mind you, some of that calmness was, no doubt, due to exhaustion. But, in an age of helicoptering parents who freak out at the slightest adventure their children might try to embark on, I was cheered at this display of down-to-earthedness. May there be much more of it.

It also made me think back to our adventures with three kids. Tercero's arrival meant that I had three kids under the age of five--Primero was four, Segundo two, and baby Tercero made three. What's more, they were all at home--all day, every day. There were no pre-schools in Herbert. I was hanging on until the next year when Primero would go to kindergarten--all day every second day. Salvation!

In the meantime, I would have to tough out a year with the three of them. Looking back, I miss that year with a longing that is so fierce it makes me dizzy at times. For when they are at home, and while they might drive you nuts with the incessant activity, they are, for the time being, safe in your care. And you get to watch them do their stuff, which, from my vantage point of a clean and tidy house and a couple of decades perspective, was often highly entertaining.

Tercero had two brothers to out-do, so as a baby and a toddler, he had to pull out all the stops to get noticed. He did a good job, developing some interesting and eccentric behaviours that are still topics for family conversations.

For instance, he was a sleeper--he would sleep eighteen hours a day--a long nap in the morning, another in the afternoon, and bedtime at 7:30, where the cycle would start all over again. He also refused to talk for months--he would point and gesture, and make noises. His brothers knew exactly what he wanted, and usually complied. When they didn't, he'd shriek. That got them moving fast. Actually, his shriek became his mode of defense when he got old enough to become a target for their various power-plays. Tercero would shriek so loud that Primero and Segundo would clap their hands over their ears, allowing him to escape whatever situation wasn't to his liking.

I remember becoming alarmed at his hibernating tendencies and his speechlessness, and took him to Doctor Heather, worried that something was dreadfully wrong. She assured me that I was lucky my third kid was so accommodating of my busy days, and to relax and enjoy it before he woke up and all hell would break loose.

That Doctor Heather--she knew her stuff.

Tercero decided to start talking at about two years, and then it was complete sentences that came out of his mouth--he never bothered with the single word phase. My friend Stacy (she's been my friend since high school) said he was just booting up for those first couple of years. And the morning nap disappeared, although the afternoon one hung around until kindergarten. And to this day, Tercero is the one who can sleep through anything.

He also developed some interesting qualities. His crawling, for instance. He insisted on crawling upside down--his head on the floor, arms and legs scuttling like a crab. He wore all the hair off the top of his head before he decided to walk. Jack and I often speculated that this encouraged blood-flow to his brain, because it quickly became apparent that we were dealing with a kid who was likely smarter than we were.

Tercero rounded out the combination of talents and faculties of the three sibs quite nicely, although there were times when Primero wanted to kill him. Tercero had quickly figured out what buttons to push and how to do so with the greatest effect almost as soon as he could talk. Segundo, never one to respond to button-pushing, would sit back and enjoy the show.

What the addition of a third kid showed us was how different they all were from one another. When there were two, we just assumed that they would be opposites in everything, which they were, to a large extent. But add a third, and the binary model breaks down. Three is a whole different matter--it is a wildly uneven number, impossible to evenly balance.

And there's the being outnumbered by the kids thing. Because while there's two of them, there's also two of you, and a modicum of control can be exercised. But a third addition throws a monkey wrench into the machinery. Some pretty wild lurching and sputtering and veering can result. Like any fun-ride at the fair, it's hell while you're on it, but once you're safely on the ground and enough time has gone by to settle your stomach, you think you actually had fun.

While I would never describe life with two small boys as dull, the addition of a third kicked us up several notches in the activity zone. After all, circuses are three-ring, not two.

Life became, if not exciting, then at least highly distracting. Jack and I were never bored. We might have wished for some opportunity for boredom, but it was not to be. Come to think of it, boredom still has not arrived, even after all these many years. Perhaps we've lost the ability to be bored. Perhaps it was burned out of us by running after all those kids for so long. It's an interesting thought.

Three kids meant the car's back seat was full of child-vehicular safey containers of various sorts. Back then, the two-kid stroller was unknown, unless you hitched together two umbrella strollers, like Natalie had done for her twins. Trips to the store took forever--the two ambulatory kids had to check out every squashed frog, bird, bug and snake on the roads, poking at them with sticks and the toes of their sneakers. The containerized kid would want to get out and stagger to where his brothers were autopsy-ing the road kill. And while I gritted my teeth at the time it took to do anything while walking the three of them anywhere, I realize now that it helped to slow me down. Literally, I smelled the coffee, because we usually went past Dee's house and she always had coffee on.

When I think back on living with three small children under school age, I realize how precious that short time was, and how lucky I was that I got to savour it. Even though I realized that being a full-time mom at home was stultifying my brain, I was able to experience it to find out for myself. And in the experiencing of it, I now realize that if feminism has done anything useful, it should at least present women with the choice of staying home or going to work, because both opportunities ought to be available to those who desire them.

I was lucky--I got to be a stay-at-home mom for a good while. Then I got to do other things, but I would not have missed those years at home with the three musketeers for anything. After all, it removed my boredom bone forever, it seems.