My husband and daughter are home from their Disney trip with Nana and Papa. They were scheduled to arrive mid-morning but the plane they were taking from Orlando was stuck up north in bad weather. They worked on alternate travel options but in the end, they didn't get home until close to six o'clock this evening.
My son, the dog and I got in the car and circled the airport once before they made it curbside for pickup. My husband said, "how are we going to control the enthusiasm?" referring to the dog, who was about to wag her backside off in the passenger seat. My husband got in and handed her back to the children in the backseat and the dog began happy pouncing on my daughter throwing in licks wherever she could land on skin.
My daughter was equally happy to see the dog. We had a happy family reunion for all of about thirty seconds before the bickering started in the back seat—over who got to pet the dog, who is large enough to be attended to by all four arms and both of their bodies. We tried not to intervene, but it escalated and for the life of me, I couldn't understand how after a week apart, the two of them could be reduced to squabbling so quickly.
We issued multiple rounds of stern words and warnings and they came to some sort of a truce by the time we'd arrived home fifteen minutes later. It didn't end there, though, with my son being unhappy about my daughter and me singing Frozen songs on account of it was "loud" and he couldn't hear his already loud television in the living room. He was reminded we had to listen to his television and didn't pitch a fit at him, so he was going to have to deal with some level of competing sound.
It would seem our happy family is back together again. It wasn't all bad. We were all happy to see each other and it's nice to have the house filled with our whole family once more. I think the time apart gave us each a taste of what it's like to be an only child (or the parent of an only child). I'm an only child myself so the experience I have growing up is that of being the only child in the house with two parents. I hear from people who grew up with siblings or have multiple children that this is normal. If with everything we have going on, we're normal, I'll take the bickering.
The Soon To Be Separated Children: My children have been asking on and off to be separated into their own bedrooms. We know this is going to happen eventually, but we're not sure when the best time will be yet. We've been in open discussions with them both individually and together about what it will mean, what furniture they'll have in their rooms, who will move out and where they'll be moving to. They decided together my daughter will be the one to move out. My son thinks even though he wanted to move to the bottom bed many times over the past few years that he will stay in the top bunk instead of relocating to the bottom, full-sized bed. I think he might change his mind later on that though. I've told them they will have their desks moved into their rooms from the bonus room so when they have work to do, they'll be able to go to their rooms to do so. This is in preparation for post-primary school years when they'll have more work at home. My son changed his mind when I told him about the desks tonight (on account of this involves change and he hates change). He decided he wanted to stay together until he was a teenager, probably until he was fifteen, he said. He said one more thing, which I think maybe more important for now for my daughter, which is she doesn't like sleeping alone. Case in point, my daughter went to bed a half-hour ago and messaged down via Alesa asking if someone could come upstairs to the room with her because she was scared.
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