With three small children both peace and quiet are hard to find.
From the constant arguing and attempts at compromise gone awry to happy giggling and thumps of wrestling my home is not a quiet home. There is a lot of fun but there is also a lot of frustration from both parents and children. Parents are frustrated because of constant reminders to little people (who apparently have some goldfish like qualities in that their short term memories seem to reset every 2 minutes) and requests gone unheeded. Children are frustrated because they lack the logic to understand all the rules and wish they could simply play all day without regard to cleaning up their messes, sharing, and such unnecessary things as doing chores.
There are often a few minutes in the day when everything is quiet within the walls and that usually comes from the abandon of sleep with rare instances of all three agreeing to the same activity or movie. Then there is the bittersweet quiet that comes from a sick child.
Yesterday our middle child, 5, was ill and took a three hour nap. The house seemed odd and not quiet right as he slept. And when he finally woke both his dad and I felt so relieved. We gave him lots of hugs and told him how much we had missed him in that time. It was just three hours but our family did not feel right without the chaos and noise.
While I love the quiet that comes after the kids have finally succumbed to sleep, generally after much another-water-please and I-need-to-pee-agains, but the noise is very good too.
