Outnumbered

We've always said that one of the problems with having more than two kids is that you're outnumbered. There are two of us and three of them. If you do one on one time then one kid gets left out. Or you have two kids to one adult and one adult to one kid. Or three kids to one adult which equals my everyday and equals my husband needing a time out. And now this is starting to sound like a bad math problem.

Last night we definitely felt outnumbered. We had Open House/Curriculum Night at the school. Three kids in school means three classrooms to visit. Four classrooms actually, as Chris has two. So that's two classrooms per adult in one hour, go! We made it to all four classrooms and then met back up at the front of the school to share information. I felt like I had run laps around the school by the end of the night. But it was worth it.

I love Open House. I get to sit at their seats and hear about their day. It's fun to get an inside view of what they do during the day without me. I love to see what they're writing about, what kind of pictures they're drawing. I like to see how they've organized themselves or not organized themselves. I like to look through their chair bags and desks to see the little notes they write to themselves. I like to know they have little quirks that come out when they're on their own.

For example, Analiese has a hidden piece of paper at the back of her desk with a happy face, a sad face, and an excited face drawn at the top of three columns. There are tally marks under each so I'm guessing she's keeping track of her daily moods. Chris made faces on all of his erasers and wrote a really nice story about how cool our family is. And I found all of Sicily's missing headbands in her cubby box, ten to be exact.

The experience helps me to see them as individual little people, which sometimes gets lost in the family group. I love that they have time out on their own to work out their individuality. And I love that we get to mesh all of those individuals together into this thing we call a family. We may be outnumbered but we wouldn't be complete without each of those quirky little personalities sitting around the dinner table.