Sibling Love

Yesterday afternoon, Mrs. A and I took the kids to the pool. They'd behaved so well on our recent drive out to Houston that we thought we'd reward them.

There's a place on the other side of our village that is less a pool than it is a watery playground. I'm sure you've seen them - brightly colored, fiberglass rocks, teeming with all shapes and sizes of children and adults. Single people and Child Free people like to call them, "Hell."

We've been there once before and it was crowded but not frighteningly so. LMA isn't a great swimmer and at six years old she just may never really get the hang of it. I'm not a great swimmer so she must have got those "sink or sink" genes from me. She loves playing in water, but she gets panicky. G-man, however, is like a small sea monster. He loves jumping in, splashing around, floating. Half the time his face is mostly below water and he's spitting and blowing bubbles and smiling. He got that from his graceful and water loving mom.

While at the water park, LMA starts gravitating toward girls her own age and begins running off with them to slide and splash and turn the overhead sprinklers on. Well, G-man is constantly trying to follow her. He does his own thing from time to time, but most of his day is spent trying to find her and do what she's doing. As it got toward "leaving time" he began to get really bent out of shape. She was playing with this other six year old girl and they would take off and we was too slow to follow because of his size. He just couldn't keep up. And it was making him cry.

We'd never seen that before. The two of them are basically each other's best friend because they spent all day every day with each other. G-man has only been in day care for a short time and we've been wanting to get him back into something for the sole purpose of having him interact with other kids. And the pool incident is a perfect reason why.

Of course as parents we made that "Aww" face which, if you haven't seen it before, is where someone is trying to stifle a laugh by sticking out their bottom lip. We want to laugh because of what's happening but it's sad at the same time it is sweet. He loves his sister and wants to play with her and is a bit heart broken by her playing with someone else. It was heartbreaking for us to watch too and we made sure LMA understood that she could play with other kids, but she has to make sure her little brother is there too.

I see this getting progressively more interesting as they get older.

Carry on.