These cows are small...

I've just spent two hours getting Mabel to stay asleep enough for me to leave the room. It wasn't pretty. I've heard of some parents who can successfully explain to their little darlings that Mommy needs some time with no children in the evenings, so little Tommy has to stay in bed and go to sleep - but I am deeply sceptical about this. Small children were not put on this earth to do things that make other people happy; they'll be nice if it suits them, but basically they're looking out for number one, becuase that's how they're programmed. And where another kid who is practically asleep anyway might be content to roll over and say to themselves "Ah, feckit" when they realise that Mommy is leaving the room (I'm paraphrasing here), Mabel prefers to wake herself right up and (a) grab my arm, (b) sit up and demand more mumeet, and (c) shriek like a banshee if I go away and/or send Daddy instead. And then I have to go back and she takes twice as long to stop hiccupping and her grip is twice as vice-like and her eyes are twice as ready to fly back open and I've just shot myself in the foot again and can say goodbye to another hour of my evening.

Hence, me griping about bedtime instead of presenting you with a well-thought-out and lyrical piece of prose. Them's the breaks.

I was going to say a few words about perspective. I even found you the perfect Father Ted clip to go with it. (And are these subtitles in Icelandic? How bizarre.)

When we started this year at the nursery school, I was struck by how the biggest kids in the playground no longer looked nearly so big. When Monkey started there, at the tender age of two-and-almost-a-half, the big kids looked so huge, rattling round the little racetrack on the big trikes and playing their carefully orchestrated team-like games of this and that. They were enormous, clearly six or seven or something. (They're four and five.) This year, even though Mabel's just a little older than Monkey was - and probably no bigger in stature, though definitely chattier - the big kids still look like reasonably little kids.

I mean, I'm not saying this is a great mystery. It's just interesting to me. When Monkey started, two of his classmates had big brothers who had just entered kindergarten, and they too seemed like tall, grown-up boys, in a way I can't quite get him to replicate in my mind now, even when surrounded by Mabel's friends.

And then, Mabel is blithely passing out ages when Monkey did such and such - slept through the night, for starters - without getting anywhere near the same milestones. He seemed like such a big kid to me by the time he was three, that I had to keep reminding myself how young he really was. With her, it's the other way around: I have to stop calling her the baby. The one way to remedy this is obviously the nuclear option of having another, which I'm not prepared to do just now: eventually you have to stop, and, one way or another, you're left with one last baby who insists on getting bigger no matter how much you try to ignore it.

[Aside: I used to think that ascribing something to birth order was pretty much the same as blaming it on your star sign. As soon as I had two children, I realised how gigantic an influence it really is, and how impossible to divorce from other aspects like gender or personality. If a child is raised in a family environment, their birth order will always make a difference - though I suspect that once you get to a situation where there is more than one middle child, other elements come into play. (As an only child, I get to make these observations in a vaguely superior way. I have characteristics of both firsts and lasts, but apparently lack the peacekeeper inclinations of a middle. Which doesn't explain my tendency to sit on the fence whenever possible.)]

Anyway, it's not that I don't want Mabel to grow up. It's just that I don't have any pressing need to make her act more maturely than she's ready to. Apart from my pressing need to call my evenings my own again and sleep all night in my own bed, I suppose.