It’s very fun to have kids around the house.
My kids are five and one-and-a-half. For non-kid knowers, this means the eldest can fully talk except for some (pretty cute) minor grammatical errors, and the youngest can communicate like a caveman, using a fairly robust vocabulary of maybe a hundred words like “chair” and “stop” and “go” and “no”. They can both walk and, maybe more importantly, run around and are constantly underfoot.
It’s so funny, pretty much all the time. My daughter, like lots of oldest children, has some fairly sophisticated vocabulary mixed in with the remnants of her babytalk, she corrects herself with: “Sorry, I misspoke.” My son is teaching himself to turn the TV on by himself when we aren’t looking and he’s almost got it. My daughter spontaneously started refilling the ice cube tray and making our bed in the morning. My son has started his putting-things-in-things stage, which means a lot of small objects are going to go missing and we may never find some of them again. Last year my daughter was on the tail end of this and put some Tupperware into the oven, which I definitely found when I nearly started a fire. We fortunately did not need to replace the whole stove!
My husband says it’s living with gremlins.
We spend our weekends going to parks, and kid events, and almost all our vacations have to have a visiting our family component so we either go to San Francisco or Flagstaff. I started going to church (a Buddhist church) to give them an additional community. I am surrounded by people at all times, a lifestyle extremely contrary to my childless revealed preferences.
They both involuntarily dance whenever they hear a good beat, which isn’t even limited to music. Sometimes they sway when somebody hits a chain link fence rhythmically.
My son has an evil laugh he does whenever he gets caught at something he’s not supposed to do. Sometimes he does it when he’s not doing anything wrong which is how you know he has evil intentions.
My daughter has a series of artworks of monsters, most of which have a horrifying number of eyes. “Very creative,” her TK teacher tells us, without a hint of the fear I think she should be feeling.
It’s an overwhelming lifestyle where the kids dominate practically every aspect of our lives! And that is pretty cool.
