Three To One - One Two Three

When our friends asked us a while ago, we were both thinking the same thing. Were we drunk when we promised this or what on earth got in to us? Situation: they have two kids and a strong wish to visit an exhibition and some Michelin rated restaurants in London. As they mentioned, the combination of those three things is not the best one (meaning: the children don't match with the London activities), we volunteered to look after the kids for a weekend. All this was put in the conditional tense at the time ('if you ever make it to London, we could look after the children...', 'piece of cake', 'what friends are for'...), but soon became reality. This is why we spent the weekend at their place, looking after their (and our) kids. Three alltogether. I must say I always thought the life of a 'mother' of three must be something like a hectic disaster. I was surprised to find out it's nothing like that at all. It was a lot of fun, seeing the kids play together. Because they had each other, I didn't have to play along, as I usually (have to) do as our son is an only child. Even the rituals of daily life (feeding, bathing and cuddling) were no problem at all. Fordism has proved its merits in many industries.
Since the youngest kid is only a year old, my son (who'll be two in July) kept referring to him as 'the baby', a predicate that obviously singled him out from the big kids. Very funny. All of a sudden he seemed like such a big boy himself. I could tell he really enjoyed not being the smallest kid around.

The weekend also made me wonder about what it would be like if you raise children that are not your own, like in foster care or adoption. Would/could you love these children like they were your own? Would you feel different about them than about your own child? I really don't know. Maybe someone has a blog about this, I should look it up maybe.

The weekend was a success. Right now, I still don't long for a big family of my own, but my son doesn't necessarily have to an only child for ever. There are many options.