My kids annoy the hell out of me sometimes. Right now Tevye and Grace are sitting at the dining room table,”eating” lunch, and roaring at each other.
I would take a picture but they are in constant motion. I tried, actually, but one or the other is blurry and to be honest, a picture just doesn’t quite capture what is going on.
Watching them I am reminded of August and Déla, not only of how they were at this age but also how they can be with each other still to this day.
August and Déla are almost to the day the exact same age apart as Tevye and Grace. August turned 16 and Tevye turned 5 – both earlier this month. Grace will turn 3 and Déla will turn 14 – both in August.
The elder siblings (when they are getting along, mind you) almost seem to speak a language all their own. Yes, a large part of that is due to generational differences, I know, but also part of it is due to how close the two of them are and have been.
Take, for instance, robotics and high school. Last night at dinner Déla was reacting to August talking about things happening at his school, and mentioned that she almost wished she had accepted going to Blanchet instead of going to Holy Names. For those who don’t know, Bishop Blanchet is the (literally) local catholic high school which is where August is currently enrolled in 9th grade and Holy Names Academy is the all-girls high school where Déla will attend next year – and it is not close.
While there was a moment when she almost might have half-wished she were going to Blanchet, and August was attempting to use his Robotics team as a selling point so the two of them could be together, ultimately Déla came out of the exchange happy with her decision to attend Holy Names. Then August tried to talk her into joining the Holy Names robotics team so they could have a shared activity. When reminded that Holy Names’ robotics team did better in the finals and overall in the season than Blanchet’s team, August then backpedaled a bit.
The point being, August and Déla, when they aren’t consumed with being teenagers, have a good relationship that I hope will continue into adulthood. This is the same relationship we saw in them whey they were Tevye and Grace’s ages, the same relationship we see in the younger two now.
Despite how annoying they can be, either pair, the fact they get along as well as they do fills my heart with joy in a way that is probably impossible to describe.