Chaos

Joseph and I are in a few playgroups including a really large Monday playgroup that has about 13 kids between 10 and 16 months. Today, we hosted this playgroup at our house. We had 8 moms and 9 kids (there is a set of twins in the group) in my den. It was controlled chaos...strike that...it was just chaos. Here is a video:




This is a rather tame few minutes. By the end, the kids are over-stimulated, tired and hungry (we meet at 4 so by 5-5:15 its dinnertime for most of the kids). We had many bumps of heads, screaming when toys were stolen and spilling of wine (yup, we serve wine for us Mommies!) in a little over an hour. We attempt to have adult conversation between cleaning up spills, intervening in fights over toys, and pacifying meltdowns. It's fun and it makes the late afternoon (which any stay-at-home mom knows can be the most trying part of the day) go by quickly. At the end, Rich looked around our den and said "Wow, these babies left this place worse than a college party". We had goldfish crackers and toys all over.


Today one of the Mom's even announced she was pregnant again and due this fall! Rationally, I have known this was going to happen sometime soon. These kids will all be 2 next winter or spring and 2 years is a very normal time span between having children. Since I have already seen some announcements of pregnancies due in December, I knew it was only a matter of time before Joseph's "friends" were sporting the "big brother" and "big sister" shirts. But still....it doesn't seem possible that it's been that long since I had Joseph. It seems like he should still be a tiny baby and my friends are already expecting their next tiny baby. I am not ready for that.