And Jenny, you got right to the heart of it, not so rambly at all. I don’t want my fear of his adolescence to amplify the difficulties, am rather critical of a culture that simultaneously idolizes and fears teenagers. And all of my matter-of-factness with the younger boys has yet to trickle uphill to their brothers. (Silly piece of advice gleaned from the Slate Double X Factor Blog gabfest podcast I subjected myself to today so that you don’t have to: we should raise children as if the were members of larger families, not spending too much worry and anxiety on each one. We’ve got it backwards again, you and me, trying to raise each child of our larger families as if they deserved all the attention of only children!)

As always I’d love to know what your sister thinks because I think I’ve made up all of these theories about adolescence etc. and it would be nice to have them either validated or put to bed for good. Or at least until their older sisters came along and complained of pooping in pull-ups. But she can have a few more weeks to recover from surgery and her semester, 13 is still six months off. Eeek!

And now for the ramble. As I was reading this post, I started to think about something that happened here tonight. It was a typical chaotic evening, with Patrick gone to a meeting. I had the middle girls in bed and was nursing the baby to sleep when Scout came in and announced (in her high, shrill voice) that she had pooped in her pull-up. After making the requisite groaning noises and frowny faces, I got up from where I was sitting, asking Scout the whole time to please talk a little quieter so as not to wake the baby, but of course Scout only got louder and the baby woke up, but rather than try to rock the baby back down or nurse her back to sleep (as I surely would have done with baby #1), I marched back to my room, dumped her unceremoniously in her crib and walked out. And, as baby #4 typically does, she just rolled right over and went right back to sleep.

So as I was cleaning up Scout I was thinking, man, that never would have worked with Daryl. For one, I never would have been so matter of fact about bed time with her. I would have been all worked up about whether she was going to cry, and wether we were damaging her for life if we let her cry it out or ‘spoiling” her if we kept picking her back up… it all seemed so complicated and the stakes seemed so high (for bedtime for pete’s sake). And now that I am too busy to put much effort at all into how bedtime goes down, it somehow seems to go off smoothly most of the time. Which makes me wonder how difficult this adolescence thing really needs to be, which makes me think that I am going to call my sister RIGHT NOW and tell her that I don’t care if she’s recovering from surgery, she needs to get up off her ass and respond to your questions! Because frankly I have them too and twelve is rapidly approaching in our household.

Is it the expectation that bedtime will be difficult and complicated that makes it difficult and complicated? And is there anyway to get around that firstborn thing and cut straight to the matter-of-fact acceptance that we seem to be able to meet our other children’s calamities with? Or if not, can we find a way to cut ourselves the slack we need for not being able to do it all perfectly all the time?

Because, everything else aside, you really are a kick ass mom.