About eight years ago, when Number 3 was two years old and Number 4 was a little over one, we got one of those big swing sets from Costco.
The kind with a climbing wall and a bunch of swings and a big blue slide and a playhouse over the top with a telescope and a steering wheel and a tic-tac-toe game.
I could not wait for my husband to put that thing together. We had a party and invited our friends and their kids over when it was finished.
My life would be so much easier now that we had a big play frame to occupy the kids!
Except I forgot about one thing.
Number 3 and 4 were too little to play on it unattended.
They couldn’t go down that big blue slide without me holding onto their shirt.
They couldn’t actually climb up the climbing wall without assistance.
And they couldn’t climb up the ladder without me standing behind them.
What I thought would make my life easier actually made it harder, because as one kid was going down the slide, there was a kid on the other side trying to climb up the ladder.
I found myself trying to convince the kids to stay inside rather than go play out in the yard.
By the time Number 3 was big enough to go down the slide on his own, I had given birth to Number 5.
And we started all over again.
So then I asked my husband to build a sandbox.
A big ass one that all the kids could fit in at the same time.
He did.
Now my life would be easier.
Except I forgot about Number 5 being in that I-want-to-eat-sand phase.
And Number 3 was late to the learning-how-to-pump-on-a-swing stage.
So now instead of watching all my children play harmoniously in the sandbox, I was sprinting back and forth between Number 3 who was screaming for me to push him on the swing every twelve seconds, Number 4 who was kamikazeeing herself down the slide, and Number 5 who was eating sand by the handfuls.
I was in the Bermuda Triangles of playgrounds.
It sucked, and I wanted to destroy everything more than six inches off the ground and fill the sandbox in with cement.
That cycle repeated itself when Number 6 was born.
And then again when Number 7 was born.
For nine straight years, I have been running from the sandbox to the slide to the swing to the to sandbox to the slide to the swing to the…
And forget the beach.
For almost a decade, I have watched other moms with school age children, sitting in lounge chairs for more than seventeen seconds at a stretch.
Reading.
While I alternate between telling one kid not to throw shovel fulls of sand into his brother’s face, another kid not to steal the bucket of the kid next to her, and another from walking directly into the water and straight to her death.
It’s been an exercise in endurance.
I’ve been fantasizing about the day that I’d be able to relax. Just for a few minutes.
And then, last week, I took the kids out to the playground.
And Number 6 and 7 played really nicely together.
For a whole half an hour.
They cooperated, and went up and down the ladder and the slide, over and over and over again.
All by themselves.
They played in the sandbox without eating a single grain of sand.
And they both pumped on the swings, without any assistance from me.
I was able to just sit and watch, without being on high alert.
And you know what?
It made me kind of sad.
All this waiting for them to have a little independence, and now I miss those wobbly legs at the top of the slide.
I miss a kid who is crawling.
I miss the raspberries and the clenching onto your finger and that fuzzy little duck hair.
I miss that momentary look of panic when they are in that little bucket swing with the thing between their legs and you push them backwards just a little higher than normal and then the really big smile that follows it as they swing back toward you.
I miss that struggle to pick up a Cheerio off of the highchair tray and the yogurt all over their faces.
And then the other day I was in the grocery store and I saw a woman walk out cradling a tiny little baby who couldn’t have been a month old yet.
And I missed that smell.
Oh, that smell.
I wanted to run up to her and ask, “Can I please just smell your baby? Just for a second? Please?”
I wanted to say to her, “Enjoy the swings and the slide and the sandbox and the sand and the shovels and the ladders.”
Because I didn’t. Not enough, anyway.
And now that those stages are all behind me, well, I really wish that I had.
My wife and I wanted to buy a big Costco swing set for our kids, but built a fire pit instead. Now we toast marshmallows, broken toys, Christmas trees, overdue medical bills and a lot of stuff we didn’t mean to burn. I told my kids, “Just think, if we had bought a swing set you wouldn’t have gotten to meet so many friendly fire-suppressing people.”
Oh jeez, reading this post has made m all kinds of emotional. I want my toddler to grow up but at the same time I want him to stay small forever! Ima go hug him
This post comes at the perfect time…I really needed it today. My son is 8 months old. My wife and I spent over a year and a decent amount of $ to get pregnant so I really try not to take the little stuff for granted but he has developed (what I am told is typical) separation anxiety at night where he is waking up every hour and doesn’t need to eat but wants me to hold him and wakes up and cries every time I put him down. It’s been a rough couple of days to say the least. I find myself wishing to be in the next phase so this part of the craziness can be over. Thanks for helping me to put it in perspective.