Recently, a friend from work put my home video tapes onto DVD. I haven't watched them all yet, but the other night Anna and I watched one of them that had her as a newborn up until about her third birthday. It also had Christmas 2006 on there. Anna was 2, Alex was 4. Man, they were cute! Sweet little voices, chubby little cheeks. And they weren't fighting! Fighting is a daily problem at our house. So much so that we've often threatened to handcuff them together. It is exhausting constantly breaking up fights. Many days it feels like all we do is yell at them to stop fighting. But, in this sweet memory there was no fighting- they actually even hugged each other willingly! After the video, Anna said, "Mom, when exactly did Alex start hating me?" I thought that was pretty intuitive of her. And I thought about it and I think it happened when he started school and somehow learned that it isn't cool to like your sister. I'm not sure why but that is what happens. I did assure her that someday things would be different again. Her second question was, "Mom, why couldn't dad yell at us yet?" (I'm sure she noticed there was not one bit of yelling in the entire video whereas compared to today it seems it is a constant yelling fest here!). Somehow, I hope she caught on that those 2 questions are quite related. I started thinking that I should probably take a home video of a typical fighting session so that someday when they are losing their own minds as parents they can see just how much fun they were at this age. God knows there is enough opportunities these days!
Here they were when they didn't hate each other:
And recently when I made the mistake of actually asking them to sit by each other for a picture.....
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