Raising Boys

What is it about boys? I would argue that it takes a special kind of tenacity (read insanity) to raise them, if I knew it would be satisfactorily profound, which it’s not. Everybody’s like, “duh.” Boys are “easy” to raise, though, or so I’ve heard some say.

Now I don’t have any girls, so of course I can’t compare and contrast what it would be like against boys. But what I can compare is how life used to be before I had these little savage warriors tearing around my 900 square foot house versus now.

Can I say it this way? There used to be peace. It used to be boring. Not so anymore.

Now there’s slapping, hitting, pinching, fighting, wrestling, hitting with play weapons, hitting with blunt objects, stunt jumping for sport, stunt jumping with malicious intent, stunt jumping to produce injury upon sibling to greater effect, and so on. It’s chaos.

There’s laundry everywhere. How should I know if it’s clean or dirty? It’s just everywhere, that’s all. Random Legos poke up out of the carpet only at the precise moment when a coincidentally bare foot is most likely to impact the jagged edge of them with the most pressure, pounds per square inch. And spaghetti sauce is not meant to be eaten, dear father, it’s meant to be launched off my spoon, placed just-so against the edge of my plate and thwacked like a wee little medieval siege works. Silly daddy, catapults are for kids.

But at the end of the night, when we’ve looked back over all of it and picked out our favorite parts of the day—for instance, “dad, my favorite part of the day was tickles (a half hour marathon that ultimately required medication for yours truly)”—and we’ve said our prayers, life is good. The chaos is good. And I really wouldn’t want to go back to boring. That would suck.