Starling Age 6 and a Strange Spanning of Time.

Little Star turned SIX at the end of March.

One can tell themselves, as I have been this past year, that five isn't really so far removed from baby and toddlerhood (especially easy to believe when that five year old is the baby of the family), but ... six? It feels like we've crossed a threshold.

More and more my life is shifting away from what it has been (what I have been) for over two decades (a life of mothering a houseful of very small, needy people) to something more like what life was in my parents' home while I was growing up--a few of us younger ones still around, but also a lot of older siblings off on missions, and starting college, and off to graduate school, and getting married and beginning their own families (and coming home only for Sunday dinners or holidays). 

It feels very strange to be recognizing my own childhood so clearly in the dynamics around here now. After all, I didn't grow up as my older kids have--with a home full of babies and toddlers and all my siblings around. I grew up ending my parents own decades of baby years. I grew up while my parents were watching their older kids take on lives of their own and while they were experiencing how that changed home and family. It's very strange having not only lived just what Starling is living now, but to be reliving it, in a sense, from my parents' vantage point. I can't quite express how strange and caught-between-times and tied to the past as well as the future it all makes me feel. I can't explain how newly connected to my parents I feel as I recognize in my life now .... what they experienced in their lives as I left toddlerhood behind.

I could go on about all the things I am sensing shifting and changing in our family, and all the wonderings I have about what that will mean in the years ahead, but for now, we will just wish a very happy birthday to this little tenth child, who, like myself (also a tenth child) will grow up with her little passel of closely-aged siblings (Summer, Mette and Hans) watching us usher in so many new phases of existence for our family!

Happy 6th birthday Starling!

(Though perhaps I should add that I haven't so completely left the stage of mothering helpless people behind as this post might have made things sound. It actually took me about 40 minutes just to write the above as every time I'd write a sentence, I had to get back up again for something the youngest two needed. Starling needed me to cook her something in the microwave for lunch, and then I sat, and then Hans needed help getting butter and salt on his own lunch, and then I tried to sit and type again, and then they both needed drinks, then I sat, and then Starling spilled milk, and then I tried again, and then they both needed lifted to the area over our closet where their Duplo Legos are strewn. And just now I had to wash and bandage the back of Mette's heals after she cut them on a door that swung shut.)