Slow down...

Every mother says her kids are growing up too fast. It’s not just a saying. You feel it, you really look at how big your kid is getting and your heart aches remembering the small bundle you started off with. How dependent and helpless a baby is when they come into the world quickly vanishes. I still find it hard to believe how tall, independent, and helpful Big Brother has become.

Lately I find myself being caught off guard when Little Brother masters something new. Today he learned how to use a fork. We’ve had the little plastics ones for as long as we’ve had the spoons. I’d give him a fork and a spoon to hold while I fed him to keep him from grabbing at the spoon I’m trying to feed him with. He likes to swat food off the spoon or smack it right out of my hand. He went through this stage where he wanted to feed himself. Of course as any baby he wanted to do it with his hands. Chopped up meat, green beans, corn. Anything that he could pinch and stick in his mouth was a new favorite. When I gave him his plate of food at lunch I was so surprised when he actually used his fork to jab his food and feed himself. I don’t know if it was because I always gave him a fork or spoon at mealtime or that he had a sibling to copy.

Big Brother is now our schoolboy in his third year of school. He still wakes up like he’s little though. He needs to be hugged and laid with when the alarm goes off. He tells his dad or me about his dream. Asks if he has school and are we driving him in. He caught the bus everyday before Little Brother came along. He’s a smart kid. When I asked him why he never wants to catch the bus he told me. “Daddy is at work all the time. He doesn’t get me off the bus. You are in the driveway everyday. If I don’t catch the bus then daddy drives me and we talk and I have a good day.” I remember Big Brother’s first day of school. How I waited all day for a phone call to go get him. Now I wait at the end of the driveway for him. I miss that boy while he’s gone and I’m lucky if I can steal a hug when he tosses me his book bag.

Little Brother is all over the place now. When he was crawling he was everywhere too but now it’s on a whole new level. He walks in the toy room and comes out with a toy, we’ll say a dump truck. He’ll walk to the washing machine, open the door and put the truck in. Then he’ll go in my bedroom and grab a blanket. He’ll drag it to the living room and sit with it for a few minutes. He sees the phone or remote and decides he’s going to walk around talking on it. My house phone is always dead because he gets a hold of it and tries to jabber all day. I can never keep it on the charger. After his phone call he needs to take every shoe one by one to different rooms of the house. By maybe the fourth or fifth shoe he gets distracted by the cupboards and wants to pull everything out. He’ll take a can of soup and go put it in his brother’s room on a bookshelf. He’ll take one of his brother’s books and put it in the cupboard. All this in about four minutes. I used to watch Big Brother have all these little jobs but now they are Little Brother’s.

Now that Little Brother is learning to run he wants to keep up with Big Brother. A favorite game for both of them is running around in circles in the living room. Spinning until they fall down, bumping into each other and laughing. I tell them to slow down but in my heart I wish they weren’t growing up so fast and that I could pause the crazy, silly, loud, bossy, shoving, picky age or even just see it slow down...