Sep 30 2008
The Mathematics of Noise
Anyone who’s cared for more than one child at a time can attest to the fact that their noise increases exponentially with their numbers.
Two children can sound like four. Three like nine. Four like sixteen.
You get my drift.
For the past day and a half, we’ve had the equivalent of 25 children bringing down the house with their racket. Granted most of those children were mine, but even one extra can make a significant difference.
My 12 year old sister (yes I said sister) spent the night and most of today at our house while my mother was at work. The kids were all off from school because it was a teacher planning day and since I’m the stay-at-home mom du jour, our house got volunteered for sleepover duty.
Mostly I don’t mind. Mostly.
Except I sort of do. See it’s not my sister that’s the problem in and of herself. On her own she’s perfectly acceptable. Just like each of my kids, one on one, are more than manageable. Now, throw them all together in to a 1200 sq. ft. home with two dogs and only one available television and they are bound to grate on each other’s nerves. They also tend to talk over each other, each one increasing in volume until they reach a painful crescendo that actually makes my eyeballs vibrate.
Not to mention the extra child changes the family dynamics drastically. There are more pointless skirmishes, quicker tempers, more hyperactivity related scrapes and bumps. It’s like that one extra kid makes everyone else lose their mind.
Lose. It.
The teen retreats even further in to her bat cave. My ten year old gets sassier, my five year old gets whinier. Even the baby gets pushier, louder, and dare I say wilder than any almost-two-year old should get.
It probably doesn’t help that my hormones are once again in upheaval. I can’t even count how many times I snapped and shouted and hissed through gritted teeth to no avail. Nobody even flinched.
Then for some odd reason I was compelled to take them all on a brief grocery run. I returned with all five of them…and my sanity just barely intact.
I was practically shoving them out the door this evening when my mom came to pick her up. “So nice having you, come back soon, bye-bye.”
Give me my routine. Give me predictability. Give me children that can scurry when mom goes bananas. Give me the relative peace of 16 screaming children vs. 25, any day.
I feel your pain! A few weeks ago, I watched a friend’s 3-year-old boy for 3 days. I figured, what’s one more kid added to my own two girls. Wow! What a difference it made. Having two 3-year-olds and a 7-year-old together in the house meant someone was always screaming, throwing a fit, or crying (a few times it was me)!