Questions for Children

There are many, many things that mystify me about my children, but two immediately come to mind.

1) Do all children have an alarm akin to the bat signal hardwired in their brain that alerts them to their mother going to the bathroom? It doesn't matter what my kiddies are doing, how great the (*cough, cough*) educational dvd is at that precise moment, they will immediately stop anything and everything to follow me to the bathroom. They don't even see me headed to the bathroom. THEY JUST KNOW. It's like a freaky circus side show trick. My boys love to talk to me while I am residing on the potty. Imagine me and three children five and under conversing in our downstairs half bath. It's a picture I will not use for our holiday card this year.

Interestingly, the bat signal bathroom alarm only works for mommies. There is no similar alert to the kiddies when the daddy wants to head upstairs to the private master bathroom with some hefty reading material. He is free to go, alone, for quite some time. Alone. For a LONG time. And while he is gone, not one child will seek him out.

2) Do my children have super secret meetings during the twilight hours to negotiate who is going to bear the proud honor of being the high maintenance child for the day? Among my children, they are never all, how shall we say, "challenging" (read: high maintenance) at the same time. Rather, they trade the "challenging" persona off and on among the three of them. It appears to me that the boys understand and respect that their parents simply can't handle all three of them in challenging mode, so they negotiate responsibility for that job on a daily basis.

I have found this holds true not only for their behavior, but also for sickness. I note the last bout of the stomach flu saw me cleaning up after Brennan as he vomited from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m. and then Aidan from 2 a.m. until 5 a.m. I found it quite thoughtful of both of them to be so thorough and precise in their planning.