Parenting three: Whose needs come first?

I spend my days evaluating the needs of my three children and determining whose needs should come first. What’s the most urgent situation? Tending to the baby’s dirty diaper? Fetching a snack for my eternally hungry 5-year-old? Helping my 3-year-old in the bathroom? What do I need to do to keep the balance around here, to make sure that each child gets what s/he needs and that we all are happier for it?

A few recent situations have included:

1. (S comes first.) Yesterday, I decided that it would be nice to take a walk with the kids after lunch. It was the day after we got back from vacation, and we’d been inside not doing much all day, and I didn’t intend any formal outings because I just needed to be around the house for the day. (Ah, priority number one. The hidden priority. Sometimes I do get to do what I want.) So we went for a walk. Approximately two houses down the road B told me his legs were too tired to make it any farther than around the block. No sooner had we resolved his laziness than I heard S, tagging along behind as usual, whimpering that she was too tired. E, in the stroller, was as happy as could be, kicking her feet and squealing with joy at the trees, the cars going by, birds, everything. I was happy to have her in the stroller and not on my hip. She is at the stage where she gets into everything, and our house provides a lot of everything to get into. I am constantly bending over to pick her up, swinging her onto my hip and going through the day. So the walk. The walk was supposed to be good for all of us. But we had to abort. S was tired out. From vacation. And she needed quiet time. Now. B put up a fight, even though he’d been the first to complain. E tends to go with the flow and didn’t know any better that the walk I had intended was much longer than around the block. We went inside. S had quiet time. Bickering ensued. E spent the next two hours alternating between being on my hip and eating potting soil and other savory treats that are at her crawling eye-level. It was not clear to me if I made the right call. I could have put S in the stroller and E in the backpack, for instance. That might have been a better solution in the long run. Oh, but my aching back.

2. (E comes first.) Friday morning, our last full morning of vacation, the troops were all hopping on their bikes and into the bike trailers to take a trip to the amazing playground two miles up the bike path from our fabulous beach house. I could have hopped on my bike, buckled Em into the trailer and gone along. She would have been fine. I would have enjoyed seeing the other eight kids playing on the swings and climbing up the giant plastic fish-scale stairs to the top of the slide, swimming in the deeper part of our glorious lake. But my mothering-an-infant instincts were too loud. The baby needs a nap, I heard clearly. It had been a busy week, and she had napped pretty well. But I sensed she needed a good nap that morning. So I put E down, let everyone else go on their way, and met up with them all on their way home more than two hours later, when E woke up. I missed out on some fun playing, but I did read a few short stories out of Olive Kittredge, our next book group book. And it was nice to enjoy the quiet and look out on the lake sparkling before me. And E got a good nap.

3. (B comes first.) Same bike trip as above. I put E in the trailer after she woke up and set out to see where everyone was. J had called to tell me they were heading home and could maybe use some help. B had opted to ride his scooter the whole way, and it seemed likely that he’d need a ride home in our bike trailer. First I passed GG and Jamis, and soon after Sarah, Dan and their two little ones. Then my sister-in-law with her son in a bike seat behind her. Finally, I met up with everyone else just after they had set out. My brother had his daughter and S in his bike trailer, and his son was on his bike beside him. Not pedaling. J was on his bike, and B was scooting along beside. It was clear that my nephew would need the first “rescue.” So I took S and put her beside E in the trailer and we rode back to the house. When we got there S was falling apart, tired, hungry and ready to collapse. But all I could think about was B, back there on the bike path, scooting along slowly. I left the girls with GG, S nearly in a puddle of tears and fatigue, and turned around with the bike trailer empty this time. B had made it more than a mile on his scooter, but he sure was grateful to ride in the trailer for the rest of the way. As I pedaled, happy to be on my bike and not pregnant like I was last year, I listened to him hum all the way back to the house. And when we got there, S was happy as could be, all dressed up with a party hat on, ready to celebrate her cousins’ birthdays.

These are just three silly examples of the prioritizing that is always happening because I have more than one child, even more so because there are three. With two, especially two close in age, like B and S, I often found that their needs were much the same. Or could be accommodated more easily somehow. Snacking. Napping. Resting. Outings. But now they are older, and there is a crawling sibling in the house, and it seems that someone always needs something. And I have to respond, most often instinctively (because I just don’t have the time to actually think about it all beforehand) to whomever is most on edge or in need or deserving of my attention. I have left S on the toilet while finishing reading a book to B. I have left E in a dirty diaper while helping S with an art project. I have left B mid-sentence to fish a small plastic toy from his baby sister’s cheek. Last night, I put E in bed and left her screaming, because it was time to tell B and S their Jennie-and-Beth bedtime story—a ritual that has capped off their bedtime routine since they first started to share a room more than two years ago. I knew E would fall asleep and, more important, wake up happy. And that’s what I’m working toward most of the time. Happiness. For everyone. It’s a tall order to fill and a lot of responsibility. And I don’t always get it right. But it’s one of the demands of having three kids. And I’ll keep at it for as long as they need me. The tricky part is fitting in my own needs. (Beyond a day of no errands and a few hours of waiting for a nap to be over.) But that’s a topic for another post.