pieces and ponderings

My children, numbers 3-5, helped me with grocery shopping at our local Sam’s Club this morning.  I bribed, or rather, enticed them by offering to stop first for breakfast at Chick-fil-a…this usually works.  As the four of us munched on breakfast food, the older two began a tongue-in-cheek conversation about being the middle children of our family.

Child number 3 claims that he is the “true” middle child, having two older siblings and two younger siblings.  They decided that child number 4 is really the “lower middle,” not quite as “middle” as number 3.

They went on and on about how tough life is as middle children (they’ve had it ohh so rough…yeah, right).  They spoke of all the privileges of the oldest child, not understanding of course that child number 1 is the test pilot of the children in a family.  Firstborns are the ones that parents begin learning about parenting with…and they often carry more responsibility when the younger children come along.

Then there is child number 2 in our family.  The two middles say she doesn’t even count, because she is the only girl in a family with 4 boys…she’s like an only child, they say (yeah, right again).

They continued to joke about their older siblings’ advantages and their suffering.  Then they turned their diatribe on their little brother, child number 5…the baby of the family…poor guy.  Of course, just my saying, “Poor guy,” in reference to their little brother, would in their eyes back up their argument of the youngest receiving special treatment.

It would seem that no matter how hard we try as parents, there will always be times when a child sees their place in life as unfair and wonder if the grass is actually greener on the other side, or sides, of the birth order fence.

As my “true” middle and I were waiting at the check-out line for little brothers to return with ice cream (see, I told you they suffer), child number 3 looked down at me from his 6’4’’ point of view and said, “Mom, I finally know what the 2.5 children per family means in all of those statistics you hear about.”

“Really,” I replied, because I’ve always wanted to know how you can have 2.5 children.  “Please, tell me,” I asked.

“The 2.5 is really 3 children, but the .5 is the middle child because they only count half as much,” he said with a smirk on his face.  I laughed at his clever thinking and wry sense of humor.

“Yeah…right,” I said.