A recent NYT article discusses studies finding that the first-born in a family has a higher IQ than that child’s siblings. It makes some sense; as the article points out:

Firstborns have their parents’ undivided attention as infants, and even if that attention is later divided evenly with a sibling or more, it means that over time they will have more cumulative adult attention, in theory enriching their vocabulary and reasoning abilities.

What researchers can’t figure out is why, among kids under 12, the younger siblings outscore their older sisters and brothers on IQ tests. One theory:

Adding a young child may, in a sense, diminish the family’s overall intellectual environment, as far as an older sibling is concerned; yet the younger sibling benefits from the maturity of both the parents and the older brother or sister. This dynamic may quickly cancel and reverse the head start the older child received from his parents.

See, this is why we can’t risk having a third kid, despite how much fun some people make it sound. We just can’t risk diminishing our overall intellectual environment any further…

Luckily, it didn’t take much (it was really only an hour, after all, and I didn’t even get any bruises) but it was abundantly, extravagantly erased by:

lots of sympathy from family and friends, both in the computer and out

+ a quiet afternoon playing with my boys

+ Saturday morning at the farmer’s market listening to a friend’s band

+ an afternoon at our friends’ new home, making up for the previous day’s aborted playdate

+ an impromptu barbecue with three other families (8 kids under 6 all playing easily together while the parents eat and visit)

+ Sunday morning’s chocolate-chip coconut coffee cake (happy Father’s Day, Tony!)

+ a sunny afternoon at the San Jose Giants game, both watching the game and, when it got too hot, watching the boys play the carnival games in the parking lot

+ another great dinner with friends (two nights in a row being fed by someone else!)

+ another late night, carrying sleepy, sweaty-headed boys from the car up to bed

= a sunny summer weekend with old friends and happy kids and good food

I wasn’t planning to participate in today’s blog bonanza on discipline. I loved The No-Cry Discipline Solution, but I thought I’d said all I had to say about it, and discipline. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think about discipline anymore. It’s like thinking about global warming, maybe; you know that your thoughtful action will make a difference, but sometimes you just want to pretend things’ll change on their own, without you.

But in fact, I do buy those twisty light bulbs, compost, recycle, and turn out lights when I leave the room. I also spend an inordinate amount of time saying “use your words” or “calm your body down” or “take a deep breath with me” and reminding Ben that his actions, like his brother’s, like mine, have consequences.

Which is why today, less than thirty minutes after we’d arrived at his friend’s house, a half-hour drive from ours, I packed him, kicking and screaming, back into the car, and drove home.

Maybe I should have seen it coming. I’ve been feeling lousy all week, and so haven’t been the most present parent. The boys had been up less than half an hour this morning before they were fighting over a spoon, and although I handled that fine, I didn’t see it as a sign of things to come. I suppose if you took every struggle as a sign of worse to come, you’d just crawl back under the covers. Sometimes it gets worse, but sometimes it gets better, and the uncertainty generally leaves me pretty optimistic.

Meanwhile, the end of preschool last week brought a fun week of vacation this week, but also a dizzying lack of schedule and routine.

Also, his good friend, one he’s known since before he was eating solid food, the one we tried to visit today, moved to another town.

Also, the week’s been hot and sunny– weather I soak up like a chameleon, but which leaves my fog-raised boys a little out of sorts.

So there we were: me, dosed up on advil and pseudo-sudafed, pretending I felt well enough for the excursion, dressed in my pretty new Goodwill sundress and a bangle bracelet Tony’s dad made in the 70s; the boys in shorts and t-shirts, wriggling through my careful application of sunscreen, eager to just get there already.

They sang a song about garbage all the way across the city and over the bridge, but even though it was tuneless and repetitive, they were happy, and I was happy, and I didn’t complain, even when it turned into shrieking.

When we got to our friends’ house (because of course these are my friends, too, the mom a person I treasure for getting me through some comically low points – like ten minutes with 2 toddlers, a crawler and a newborn in one grimy bathroom stall—with incredible good cheer), Ben told Eli he couldn’t play in the basement playroom. We got through that one.

Then Ben and his friend started running back and forth from playroom to living room, bringing out a toy stroller, a batting helmet, toy guitars, setting up for a concert. The halls are crowded with boxes (they just moved in last week), and Eli kept nearly getting knocked over. I asked Ben to keep the toys in the playroom, to open the sliding door into the backyard (“Look, this can be your curtain!”) and make the yard their stage. He started arguing with me about how far backstage (the playroom) needed to be from the stage (the living room), and I tried to have the reasonable conversation about concert hall lay-out, but I’d already lost him. He was shaking and shouting, red-faced, crying, still upset that I’d let Eli in the room at all, flailing his arms and legs the way he does when he wants to hit me.

So I asked him to sit with me a minute and try to talk, but it was too late. I suggested maybe we should set up another game, but he was stuck on the concert idea and couldn’t let it go. And then I pointed out that maybe if he couldn’t listen to my ideas we should leave, but that just made it worse, and then he did kick me, and being hit by a 45-pound 5 year-old hurts pretty badly, but I still didn’t lose my temper, just said I thought it was really time to go.

Eli was watching all this calmly, unsure what to make of it, and Ben’s friend and little sister were looking on in surprise at this uncharacteristic outburst from their friend. Their mom, bless her, strapped Eli in to his carseat and put all my other stuff into the car because I had my hands quite literally full with a kicking and flailing boy who wouldn’t walk out the door. I had to push him into his booster seat and he got a few more good kicks landed while I buckled him, and then he screamed the first 8 miles of the drive home. I know, because I was watching the odometer, willing myself not to cry, because then we’d just get in an accident and that would make one lousy hour last a whole lot longer.

So there it is. I think I did the right thing, but sometimes even doing the right thing doesn’t feel so great.

Lisa Belkin takes on the topic of the family dinner in today’s New York Times, so anyone out there feeling guilty at not gathering the kids round the table every night, take heart: there are other ways, other times, to connect with the family.

Of course.

It’s easy for us now: Tony and I both work flexible schedules so that we can be home for dinner, the kids are young enough to do what we tell them to do (mostly) and don’t have loads of activities crowding their schedules.

And it’s not easy for us now: Ben bolts his dinner and asks to get back to drawing, or he fidgets and fiddles and sticks his feet on the table until we insist he leave the table until he remembers how to behave; Eli eats a bite, climbs down from the chair (oh, how we miss the straps on his booster and high chair!), walks around to say “hi!” to Ben, climbs back up, takes a bite, climbs down, runs into the living room for a cuddle with his lovely, climbs back up… You get the idea.

But still, more often than not, all four of us manage to sit at the table and enjoy the food, and have a few moments’ conversation about the day, about what new number Ben learned (he’s into big numbers now: quadrillion and quintillion and so on), or what Eli did at the playground with his friend, and even if it only lasts a couple minutes and it takes some effort, it’s important to me to try. I like to cook, and I like to eat, but more important than those to me is the community formed around the table.

So, although I won’t feel guilty if we can’t, I hope we can keep this up even when the kids are racing off to soccer and band practice and friends’ houses and part-time jobs. I hope sitting together round the table will matter to them as much as it does to Tony and me.

Ben is off from school this week, and although I have plenty of work to do, I have to shelve it and pretend that I’m on vacation, too. Tony’s doing the same, so we took the boys to Train Town yesterday. We’d been once before, when I was pregnant with Eli; it’s a low-key, hokey kind of place, with a big steam train meandering through woods and past waterfalls and miniature replicas of 19th century Sierra mountain towns. That first trip, we rode the train once and then went into town for ice cream.

This time, as we rode the train and tried to keep Eli from falling out (he was leaning over the side, intently studying the train’s pistons and couplings), Ben noticed the amusement park rides. These hadn’t made any impression on that first trip, but there’s a small carousel, a Ferris wheel, a plane ride, even a miniature roller coaster. Ben kept eying those planes, and after our train ride, asked to buy a ticket for the airplane. “But you have to go on by yourself, you know,” I cautioned. “It’s too small for Daddy and me, and it’s too big for Eli.” Ben went over and read the sign himself: “Children only. No adults allowed.” “That’s ok!” he answered brightly. “I’m up for it!”

Well! My cautious boy is spreading his wings. He rode once, doing his air traffic controller play-by-play the whole time, then jumped off the plane, beaming, and asked to ride again. So he did, and in a day with two exceptionally happy boys, the best part for Tony and me was watching Ben, flying that plane.

(no spoilers here…)

I never would have gotten hooked on The Sopranos if it had started after I became a mother; my ability to stomach violent television is virtually non-existent now. But I got hooked, and then even after Ben came along changing everything, I kept watching because the characters were compelling, it was well-written and funny, these screwed-up families held my interest.

And, you know, just when it got too hard, the show would go on hiatus for a year or two.

Still, I’d been sort of anticipating these last few episodes with a mix of relief and dread. I’m done with the show. I can’t watch it anymore. I’m glad it’s over. But I didn’t want to see all these great characters go out in a terrible blood bath.

There were some moments that were pretty hard to watch (so in fact I didn’t; I’ve gotten really adept at using a throw pillow to cover my eyes while I plug my ears, because often the soundtrack is worse than the visual). But the last five minutes of the last show tonight captured everything I loved about the show: a normal-looking family gathering for a meal, talking about their days, heart-pounding tension building as you’re led to believe something terrible’s going to happen, nothing resolved, all of it set to the perfect song.

Now I can exhale and move on with my life.

My paternal grandmother, a steely bird of a woman who’d been advised not to have kids lest it damage her already weak heart and then went on to have four, apparently used to say that it’s not a family until you have more kids than you can grab with your two hands.

She was up to the challenge, and so were my parents, who produced four of their own. Tony and I –having started our family when we were ten years older than my parents or grandparents– have stopped at two. But this week we’ve had a good dose of four, as we’ve helped out good friends by babysitting their pair for hours while they pack and move. We had two full mornings and then today, moving day, their kids arrived at 8:30 a.m. for the day.

I went to sleep last night, thinking “I should plan some activities for the day,” then of course promptly fell asleep. So much for planning! But we’ve been doing this parenting thing awhile now, watch the kids in our babysitting co-op a lot, and are helped, too, by our co-op preschool experience (weekly work shifts with 30-odd kids). By noon we’d made muffins, a pan of enchiladas to deliver to our friends later, decorated t-shirts to commemorate the day, and fed the four children an assortment of snacks and lunches. Sadly, Eli didn’t nap for very long this afternoon, but otherwise everybody held up well and we didn’t need to resort to videos, computer games, or ropes.

Still, obviously I paced myself today for a sprint, not a marathon. I can gear up for a day or two of being outnumbered, but I wouldn’t want to do this every day.

His first year, he slept in a sling, in a cradle, in the car seat, in our arms, in the stroller, swaddled or not, blankets or none, wherever he dropped off.

Last year (pictured) he slept solo.

Now, he sleeps with a crowd:
His flannel and satin lovey blanket
A knit mole (Mole)
A small gray bear, knit by his aunt (New Bear)
A piglet with a bell inside (Jingle Pig)
A blue plush cow (Moo)
A plush giraffe (Giraffey)
A plush lemur (Ringo)
A plush gorilla (Gorilla)
A fabric dachsaund (Doggie)
A toy hard hat
A toy screwdriver
My car keys (when he can get ’em)
Maisy’s Favorite Things
Corduroy
The polka-dot blanket
The Pooh blanket
The bah-bah black sheep blanket (knit for him by a friend)
The shark blanket
The moon and stars blanket (a hand-me-down from his cousins)
The cow blanket

I’ll keep letting him add things, I don’t care, as long as he still finds room for himself, as long as sleeps…

It was one of those days…

At 6:30 a.m., after Eli and I had gotten up and cuddled on the couch a while, I got a mug off the shelf, got a box of tea down off the shelf, then got distracted.

At 10:00 a.m., after breakfast and a run and a shower, I put the tea bag in the mug and filled the kettle, then got distracted.

At 10:30 a.m., I turned the gas on under the kettle, but then Eli noticed and started to clamor for his own cup of tea: “Tea? tea? Li-li tea??” And while he’s perfectly welcome to join me occasionally in a cup of lukewarm decaffeinated tea, this time I just wasn’t up for the supervision: he wants to have his tea in the little personalized ceramic mug my parents gave him; he wants to get an ice cube out of the freezer (all by himself; one day I fear he’ll tumble headfirst into the low freezer drawer and be lost among the frozen edamame, berries, tortillas and the mason jar of limoncello I made 2 years ago and haven’t touched) and plop it, repeatedly, into the cup; he wants to “duhnk! duhnk! duhnk!” the tea bag and put in the “shuh-shuh” all by himself, stirring, stirring, stirring with the spoon he gets out of the drawer all by himself (after hauling the stool over to the silverware drawer, pulling the drawer out so hard I’m afraid he’s going to brain himself, and then half-falling off the stool because he forgets that he’s actually on the stool). It all quickly devolves into water play which sometimes is fine, but today I just didn’t have the strength.

So I took both boys outside to play baseball instead.

At 3:00 p.m., during Eli’s nap, I boiled the water and poured it into the mug over the tea bag, but then I got distracted.

At 4:00 p.m., Eli having woken up, I took the tea bag out of the mug, added some milk, and put the mug into the microwave, but then I got distracted.

At 4:30 p.m., after Tony took Eli to collect Ben from school, I got the mug out of the microwave and finally sat down to drink my cup of lukewarm tea. It really tasted pretty good.

Ben (who is not pictured because I forgot my camera, though he does in fact have the same pj’s and stuffed dog as Google boy here…) had his first sleepover last night: at his preschool! This is a long-standing tradition for the graduating kids–so long-standing that one of the teachers chaperoned a current parent on her sleepover. The families all gathered for a potluck barbecue dinner; at 8 p.m., a bell rang and we departed, leaving a few teachers and six hardy parents to wrangle 20+ excited preschoolers for the night. Ben hardly noticed our leaving, though Eli was very sad at leaving “Buh–buh” behind.

The kids got themselves into pj’s (most before we’d even left) and made glow-stick necklaces so that they could play flashlight tag in the yard after dark. They were invited in for cups of milk before bed, read to, and then left listening to stories on tape. I’m told most of the kids were asleep before 10, with a couple hold-outs finally dropping off around 11. Two kids changed their minds about staying over before bedtime; only one family got a 2 a.m. call to collect their daughter.

When we got to school this morning around 8, we found Ben (who’d managed to sleep through the early bird cacophony) sitting down to a nice breakfast buffet of fruit, yogurt, juice and banana bread. I think he’d sleepover at school every week now if he had the chance; there’s probably nowhere else outside our home that he’s happier.

It felt a little funny to walk past his empty bedroom last night, and Eli really missed him, but still, I think we could get used to this! I’m wondering how soon we can schedule the next sleepover…