Sibling Fighting

For the past week, for the first time in their lives, my boys have been fighting. It feels like all day long, but in reality I know its probably only as much as all siblings fight...maybe even less.

It's just hit me hard because, like I said, they've never actually done this before. Since Mal's birth, they were always just two peas in a happy little pod. From the first, and honestly even in utero, they've just had this amazing connection. Like they were meant to be together. Truly in all ways a pair.

And now suddenly they fight.

And I suppose I'm just overreacting. My kids are together 24/7. They wake up within a half hour of each other, they eat all their meals together, they play together, they take their naps together, they watch cartoons together, they read books together, they go outside together, they go to bed together. Any special outing or art project or cooking that one gets to do, the other has a finger in. What relationship on this earth could ever withstand that kind of continuous company and not fight now and then?

And of course there's the oft repeated fact that its not how much you fight, but how you fight that matters. We've been working on the correct ways of fighting; and talking about how everyone needs to just be alone sometimes. We've been talking about how that is ok, and important to respect.

Whoever wants to be alone is usually the one that's best understanding it right now :)

I suppose I'm just taking it so seriously because their relationship is so important to me. Your siblings are the people that know you the longest, after all. Long before your spouses, long after your parents are gone.

To have a brother, is to have someone that's got your back for life.

I try to pray for my kids daily. I firmly believe that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more powerful than I can do in their lives than to pray for them. And I pray for a lot of things; for virtues I want them to have, for sufferings I want them to be spared from. I pray that they would be true to themselves, and that they would be blessed, I pray for their future spouses, for their passions, for their careers. And increasingly since Mal has been born I've felt led to pray for their relationship with each other.

For their brotherhood.

I dont know if its important for them, or if it's just important.

But I do know this- they are a pair.

And I wont let them forget it.