"Can you take it away?"

Hi everyone! 

I want to gently nudge you to check out my new book. Just click on the picture of the book on the right. It's only $5, but only until the end on March!

And so you get a taste, here is another one of my favorite chapters from the book!

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Ah, siblings. What would we do without them? (which is a rhetorical question, by the way. Don’t answer that.) 

Yes, there is the bickering. (five kids = five opinions. We can spend twenty minutes discussing which video to watch as a family, and guaranteed someone will be unhappy with our choice.) 

Then there is the teasing. (Says Tadhg to Naomi, “You’re Baby Jesus!” Naomi yells back, “I am not Baby Jesus!”) 

And then, there is the hitting, the kicking, the grabbing, the biting, the bopping.... oh, some days seem so long. 

But there is no sight or sound like that of my children laughing together (even though sometimes it happens during dinner, and for some reason unknown to me, the children cannot stop laughing, and then one falls off the chair to the floor, and another spits out food, and then the younger ones decide to do the same and fall to the floor while spitting out food...) 

Ahem. Back to siblings.

When Tadhg was three, he was playing on the floor when he asked me, “Can you take it away?” 

I glanced about to see what he was referring to. 

“What, the book?” I asked. 

“No... Naomi,” he replied. 

I let little moments like that go. And besides, I know how crowded it can feel sometimes in a house with six other people. (believe me, I know!) 

But when things become heated and I sense a child’s resentment towards a sibling growing, I take the time to share with them a little truth. 

“They are your only siblings. Take care of them, and you will always have someone to play with.” 

And of course, I am thinking ahead to the years when they will be young adults in college, young marrieds with babies, or middle-aged adults hosting a great, big, wonderful family reunion with all their children running amuck and having a blast. I am thinking of the friendships that can last a lifetime, if cultivated properly. 

My goal is to convey to my children how special family is. It is God’s design, and God’s design is never to be taken for granted. He could have made people be born from cabbages (shows you what era I grew up in). He could have made people to be like mice, born in large litters and quick to be on their own. Or He could have made people to be more like turtles, left by their mother to fend for themselves. But God very intentionally created people to grow inside their mother (so intimate!), to be born small and weak (so dependent!), and to need many years of nurturing from a father and a mother (so unique!). 

I believe God gave us siblings to reflect His own family– the Church. We can’t choose who is in our family. There may be differing personalities and differing talents, but we are still a family. This is the same in the Church. Our brothers and sisters in Christ may not laugh at our jokes, or share the same economical background, or agree on which translation of the Bible to use, but we are still family. 

My children will not understand this for some time. All they know at this point is that a sibling is generally a good thing to have, but when you don’t want them, they don’t magically disappear. Or in Tadhg’s case... 

Dad: No, Tadhg, we don’t vacuum sisters.