Thoughts on child spacing and lazy 9 year olds.

It was a lovely day at the school for a muck out day. Because the school has goats, a sheep and a sweet pig there are stalls to be cleaned.

Rhayn was a terrible helper this time. She really disappointed me by acting lazy and standing there with a vapid expression. She held the rake, but stared lazily at the trees and goats. Sure she should have eaten first, and its possible that the feeling of malaise that I have felt all week may have been getting to her. But even Gwennie and I helped rake out the pen. Plus, when I told her that it was time to go, she did these rad moves:


If that doesn't symbolize that she was "just fine" I don't know what does. (I did enjoy watching her do this.)

I don't know how to get her to do more around the house. She is 9 for goodness sake, chores should be a given. Instead she acts like she is entitled to her lazy life. Will keeps telling me how much work he had to do as a child. But his mom was lazy and mean. That being said, I did a lot of chores, too. We had chores that had to be done every week. I think that my mom ran our house well. We all helped out and I can see that it was probably easier having all of us help. When there are 5 children cleaning the house, it goes a lot more quickly then when mom does it by herself.

There are times when I wish that we had our children closer together. It would make it all so much easier. We would be completely done, our kids would most likely all be in school or getting ready to go to school (if we had had them 2 years apart, there would be a child between the girls.) I am happy with our children. I love them both so much. I don't want to change them (except to get them to help out more.) I think when they are teenagers the spacing will be beneficial. Rhayn will go to college as Gwennie enters high school. Gwennie will go to college as the hopefully-to-be-born-in-the-next-year-baby enters high school. We will be able to help them out at college more easily (monetarily) because we won't be trying to pay for 3 kids' worth of college at once. This all makes sense.

However...

I feel sad that our kids are this far apart because they don't really have a built in friend. I don't know what my life would have been like without G'Rat. He was my best buddy, my confidant, my protector, my nemesis at times. We worked as a team, together all of the time. I look back at that and I feel terrible for having denied my girls that. I only hope that when they are older they feel close to each other, like I feel to my sister now (she is 9 years younger than me.)
Not really sure what all this rambling is about. I've just been thinking a lot lately, and this was all the stuff that came out when I started writing this post.