Brotherly Love

Being the oldest is hard. You have to experience your parents' lack of knowledge first-hand. You are their very own little guinea pig. They try out all of their "book knowledge"--no juice, no TV, no co-sleeping, timeout, wake you up to eat knowledge--without really knowing how it will turn out. By the time number 2 and so on come along, they relax, have learned what works and what doesn't, and all the rules they tried out on you don't seem to matter anymore. I am guilty of it. I think what number you are in birth order does affect who you grow up to be. (For the record, I am not the oldest. I am the baby!).

Ian is not only the oldest, he is also 5 years older than Will. It makes the relationship between them hard sometimes. Will thinks he is as old as Ian and he wants to play with his toys, his friends, and have all the same 8 year old rights at 3. Ian does a lot of eye-rolling because he really doesn't want to let Will be a part of his world. To make matters worse, Ian is stuck doing a lot of the cleaning up, sacrificing his TV preferences, etc because in the end, Will is just 3. Ultimately, all of these differences in birth order and age lead to A LOT of fights at our house. So much so, that Ian and Will can barely get a long most of the time. And when they argue, they tend to do it with fists. Lovely.

And while I realize all of this fighting is par for the course with siblings (Chrissy and I have shared epic fights!), I want them to love each other and build a relationship that will allow them to always count on one another. Every once in a while, I see little snippets. Ian will teach Will how to play a game or use one of his toys. Will returns the favor by actually helping to clean up his toys. Ian pitched the baseball to Will for at least an hour on Friday afternoon, even though Will rarely hit it and Ian was doing all of the chasing. He kept instructing him, kept his patience, and cheered mightily for Will when he finally hit the ball. And yesterday, we were swimming at the pool when Will jumped a little too close to the deep-end without his swimmies on. He panicked when he couldn't find his footing. Ian immediately swam to him and tried his best to keep him above the water until I could dive in and get to him. Will was scared more than anything else---he didn't even swallow any water--but I was so proud of Ian for doing his best to save his brother, even though most of the time he claims that he wishes he weren't around at all.

I think the hardest thing for the oldest sibling is that they do a remember a time when they were the only one around, the center of everyone's world. It is hard to learn to share the spotlight. But at the end of the day, they will do whatever they can to help, to teach, to share a little bit of their world with their little brother or sister. Even though it is hard to imagine it now, there will be a day when they are each others best friends. When the first person they call for every success or every failure is one another. I know this to be true because I have a pretty amazing big sister of my own. She has kept my head above water more times than I can count and I have happily returned the favor. So even though we have lots of fighting and arguing ahead of us between the brothers and sister in my house,  I know that at the end of the day, there is no one who will keep them afloat more than one another. Like Will said last night, "Thanks for saving me Ian." With a hug, Ian responded, "Any time, Pal."