Oblivious

My wife and I had the great pleasure of dumping our two oldest kids off at the grandparent’s house for the week. (Is “dumping” to harsh of a term when they asked for the privilege?) We were able to experience a bit of old life, with only one kid in the house.  The oldest two are 5 and 3 while the youngest is 18 months.  What a difference it makes when numbers are on your side again!

At any rate, it’s amazing how much you miss about a little person’s personality when he is the youngest of three and the others are so very loud.  The most fascinating thing about it was how independent this baby of the family is.  When he stayed behind with us, I was half expecting that we would need to focus more on him and that he would demand more attention now that he was not competing for time against his brother and sister.  But that simply turned out to not be true.  He almost entirely entertained himself.  Even as we would play “with” him, he often seemed oblivious to us and focused on his own “task at hand.”

And now that the oldest ones are back home, you can see it as they run circles around him and he sits in the middle of the living room with a book on his lap (upside down) pretending to read.  It is as though he is in the eye of the storm.  He is in a world of calm as the cyclone on chaos circles around him.

I know I often say that I wish I could have the energy of the youngsters, but there are times when I wish I had the ability of this little one to block out the crazy world around him and focus on the task at hand, whatever it may be.  I just pray that it takes a while for the elder siblings to finally rub off on him.