"Ee i ee i oh!"

Bryan and I have spent the last two months in the full time company of our 3 children. I am beginning to understand why parents sign-up early for summer camps. Bryan is convinced daily that our kids are out-of-control, undisciplined hooligans that make other harried parents look more lovingly at their own children. When you spend your days intervening in fights over food, arguments about who touched who first, who took what from whom and how it happened, saying “no” until you can’t remember there’s an alternative, answering a five year old’s incessant and often unfortunately timed questions and explaining to a two and half year old that public nudity is sadly frowned upon, you start to steal small moments of the day for yourself. What some might consider a quick jaunt to the bathroom to “take care of business” is for me a gleeful excuse to grab a book, lock the door and enforce a ten minute “Mom timeout”. Though we rarely ever find the peace and quiet to actually finish a bottle, Bryan and I find the five seconds we do get to toast each other with a glass of wine, “to surviving the insanity”, to be the most romantic interaction of our day. Noah often begins his day finding reasons to excuse himself from naptime, which we still require him to take. Bryan and I begin our day finding reasons to put him in naptime. We spend our morning planning how best to coerce all 3 kids into napping at the same time so that we can catch our breath, reclaim our limited sense of control and accuse one another for the rapid, unplanned happenstance of 3 children in our lives.

At a restaurant the other day, while our children fell quiet for the 20 seconds after food was served, Bryan turned to me, pointed to several reserved, agreeable Italian children seated behind us and asked why our kids were never that well behaved. Now, I have to be careful how I respond to Bryan in these moments of tried patience. A sarcastic response of “we don’t beat them nearly enough” often garners a reflective look that makes me worry for the kids that he’s considering the possibility and a dismissive response like “sure, but do their kids feel comfortable enough in their surroundings to drop trou and go pee whenever the urge strikes?” often garners a reflective look that makes me worry for my well-being. So, weighing my response carefully, I said “We have 3 kids under the age of five who still believe the world revolves around them, one of whom believes that when we raise our voice and tell her “no” hides behind her hands in a game of peek-a-boo because she thinks we’re playing a game of who-can-shout-the-loudest. The truth is I don’t know why other children seem better behaved than ours. I can only speak to our efforts and my children. For all that our three kids test our ability to think clearly and act rationally all day long, they offer small morsels of such heart-melting happiness, it’s a wonder we ever feel like trading them in. On the way home from a rather trying Coral Beach Seafood buffet dinner the other night, an over-tired MacKenzie started to kick and fret in frustration. As though on cue, Noah and Addison started to sing Old MacDonald, a song they knew she loved and one of the only songs they know she can join in on. So, while Bry and I are still simmering over the nights frustrating events, Noah and Addison pause after the first line “Old MacDonald had a farm” so that MacKenzie, in her small. mumbled voice can sing her favorite part, “Ee i ee i oh!” Aside from the fact that it’s unheard of for Addie to relinquish the song-singing floor to anyone, it was as though they were all working on the same wavelength to make one of their own feel better. In those moments, I wonder how it is I ever saw the world as anything less than brilliantly fulfilling and capable of great joy. Listening to our 16-month old sing “Ee i ee i oh!”, Bryan and I found our one stolen moment of peace for the day and prayed we’d see the light of it again tomorrow.