Big Kids, Little Kids, One House
It’s after midnight, and I am only sitting down now to write today’s post. It’s been a long day.
At 7:15 AM this morning, I had 3 kids around my kitchen table eating cheerios. 1st-grader Yoni, 4th-grader Yaakov and my soldier Maayan. At 7:25 Yoni and Yaakov rushed out with bulky backpacks to their schoolbus and Maayan rushed off, all in uniform, to the train to Tel Aviv.
This afternoon I listened to my youngest, 1st grader Yoni, doing his weekly reading homework. He doesn’t know all the vowels yet, so it was mostly reading sentences like “Abba wants a Banana.”
And tonight I was up late proofreading my oldest daughter, Hadas’, paper (due at midnight!) on black women poets in the Harlem Renaissance for her university seminar.
A few weeks ago Hadas was required to do an experiment on a child under the age of 8 for her class on developmental psychology. No problem, she did the experiment on Yoni. The problem was that none of the other students had siblings that age. And most didn’t, in fact, know any young children at all. So the professor asked a special favor of Hadas, if the other students could “borrow” Yoni as well. Yoni was a good sport about it. Anyway, he quickly learned the answers to the students’ questions (about perception of size and length) by heart. and one of the groups of students who came to our home to “experiment” on him even gifted him an entire bag of taffies (which I put away to give to his class for his birthday).
This story drove home for me what an unusual situation we are living in. To have children living at home who are young adults side by side with young children. I’ve always thought my young children were cute, but with my adult children home enjoying their adorable siblings as well, the sweetness I experience is ten-fold! Having everybody together sometimes bickering but often enjoying each other sharpens for me the greatness of this blessing. A wonder of wonders.
My oldest and my youngest are twelve years apart, with six others in the middle. (For a non-chareidi family, it was unusual to be a pregnant mom at my oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah.) Fast forward twenty years, and the two of them are exceptionally close. The age difference melts away as the personal similarities become more pronounced. What a bracha!
YES!
I think it is so beautiful to have such age gaps in a big family. Due to my family dynamics, I probably will not have any age gaps larger than 11/12 years (but only HaShem knows).
Our Rav has 12 kids, 4 who are B”H married and several grandchildren, and then last year his wife gave birth to children #13 bli ayin hara. So I think that baby’s nephew is 5 years old now? lol
beautiful.
Wishing you lots of nachat from everyone!