Shipping Him Off

With six children, five of them boys, it's not unusual to hear bickering, yelling, even screaming at times. Ear plugs have become my best friend and I have learned to ignore certain parts of arguments until I have to intervene because it has escalated so much. On a daily basis, situations are constantly occurring that I get pulled in to referee.

Take today, for example. I was enjoying the beautiful sunny, Spring-is-here! day, and listening to the sounds of the birds with the door wide open while typing away on the computer as the kids played outside, working out all that kid energy that I always say I wish I had. Things were going splendidly, and the baby was quietly napping. Of course, it didn't take long before one of the kids came running to tell me that another had thrown the Frisbee on top of the house.

"Wait until Dad gets home. I'm not climbing on the roof to get it," was my resolution, and they went back to play, grumbling that they didn't have anything to do if they could not use the Frisbee.

The next few minutes continued without issues. And then I heard the shrill but muffled screams of my two-year-old. Something was definitely wrong. I sent my oldest to assess the situation, but according to the noises I was hearing, he was moving too slow so I ran past him to peer out the back door. At first I didn't see my two-year-old. As a matter of fact, I didn't see him at all...but I could hear the muffled squealing.

The five year old was frantically trying to unzip a suitcase outside while my two year old screamed from inside the confines of the big black suitcase. My seven year old was running in the other direction for some unknown reason. What in the world was going on?

It just so happened that my children had decided to ship their little brother off for every time he had harassed them and messed up their rooms. This incident occurred quite a while ago and I am now almost over the horrified feeling that I had while the whole scenario was playing out.

I could not for the life of me understand why my children would do that to their little brother and I let them know that over and over again, but now that time has passed, circumstances that my two year old creates provoke me to look back with a bit of a smile and completely understand why they felt like shipping him off!