12-11-08

Two children are company, three are chaos

Leigh and I have two children that let us live in their house with them.
Lately, one of us has been talking a lot about having a third. Mexico is looking very good to me right now.
I grew up with a younger brother and sister and Leigh is an only child. You would think that I would be all about having more kids. I think it would be wonderful for Ethan and Nash to have another person to play with and torment. There is a certain comfortable chaos that grows from multiple siblings.
I don’t remember being the only child. I was five when my sister destroyed the quiet life that me and mom and dad had been living in. My sister and I got used to our new life together when four years later, my brother just messed everything up!
Everyone who knows us knows that I am joking. Jessica, Josh and I all get along so well and would do anything in the world for each other.
Growing up, we were either all for one or two against one. There were times that we all played great together and there were times that we should have been arrested.
Mom and Dad worked all day and, when I was old enough, I took care of my brother and sister after school. I remember one day I did something to get Jessica mad enough to charge at me with a butcher knife. This was the same sweet little girl that would stick up for me and Josh no matter what. There was a little girl that lived next door to us that got mad and decided to throw rocks at me. I was taught not to hit girls so I went in and told my mom. Jessica overheard and went running out the door, rang the neighbor’s door, dragged the little girl out and beat her up. The girl was older than Jess, just so you know.
When Josh was in middle school, he had a couple of boys on the school bus that were bullying him. Jess decided to wait at his bus stop. When the double doors opened up, she ran into the bus and chased the kids out the back door and proceeded to hold one down and beat the other one up with her free hand.
My talent was to scare the life out of Jess and Josh. I was pretty good at it and often put a lot of thought and preperation into bringing them close to heart failure.
We had a central vacuum in our house. If you are not familiar with one of these, it is a setup that allows a person to have a vacuum container fixed in one spot in the house and all you had to do was take a hose around the house with you and plug it into a connection in the wall.
The hose that we used was always laying around the house. Sometimes it was in the living room, sometimes we would walk over it for a week as it sat outside of my bedroom door. One morning I saw great opportunity. I placed one end of this long hose under my brother’s bed and left it there all day. That evening, when he went to bed, I took the other end down the hall where he couldn’t hear me. In a deep scarey voice I started calling his name and making moaning noises. I heard him jump up in his bed. In my scarey voice, I then said, “Don’t get out of bed. I am under your bed. I will pull you under and eat you if I see your feet.”
You would have thought the devil was sitting right next to him with the blood curtailing scream that came from his room.
Jess and Josh were pretty clever when they put their heads together. I got a cordless phone for Christmas one year. Somehow they figured out that their walkie-talkie head sets were on the same frequency as my phone. When I would get on the phone with a girlfriend, they would turn on their sets and listen. When I got off of the phone, they would come in and laugh and recite my conversation and make kissing noises.
When we were on the same team, Mom and Dad had to look out. We were either playing good together or running around the house full bore. Things were broken, holes in walls... just general chaos. We were having fun together.
These days we are all the best of friends. We talk on the phone regularly and look forward to holidays when we can get in the same room together. We reminisce about the trouble we caused Mom and Dad and even to this day, still continue to cut up and make them sigh and laugh.
Mom and Dad love to watch my sister and I pull our hair out at the antics that our kids do. They sit back and laugh and revel in the fact that they have the opportunity to see it all come full circle.
From time to time, my parents will ask, “When are you and Leigh going to have another child?”
I like to reply, “Dad, do you think I want to be as gray and crazy as you are when I am your age?”
“No” he says, “But when you are my age and you are sitting in your son’s house, watching him pull his hair out from chasing his kids, you’ll be a happy man to have had all of this chaos in your life.”
Bryan Pinkey can be reached at bpinkey@nccox.com.