Big brother, little brother

On a regular basis, raising a second kid in the presence of the first continues to make for some fun that didn’t exist the first time around. Sam is memorizing the books of the Old Testament, which have been set to a melody in their Bible Blast class for easy learning. Even so, it’s occasionally tricky (especially considering all the things that a third-grader is called on to memorize on any given day!), so there are pauses in the singing while he tries to recall what comes next.

SAM (singing): “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers…um…”
GABE (loudly singing): “Doooooo-ter-onomy! Deuteronomy!”

Of course, Gabe has no idea what he’s singing, only that it has a catchy beat. He especially loves to yell, “FIRST THESSALONIANS, SECOND THESSALONIANS!” in the middle, despite Sam aggravatedly telling him that those are in the New Testament, not the Old. Meanwhile, I’m trying to teach Gabe the Fruits of the Spirit, but for some reason, he keeps missing “goodness” and replacing it with “greatness.” Can’t imagine why…

Sam has already begun to worry about next year, when Gabe attends his school. Apparently, to his understanding, there are times (perhaps daily?) when the students with younger siblings are supposed to go down and fetch the younger kids to get them to their buses. Sam is quite anxious that he might forget to get Gabe – thus dooming his brother to live in his classroom from that point on, I suppose. No amount of explaining to him that there are kindergartners who don’t even have older siblings and who make it home each night quite well will console him; neither is he calmed by reminders that he himself rode the bus alone at that age. This is a different school, after all, and the circumstances are altered. It’s a heavy weight, but he refuses to give up the idea of bearing it. (Gabe hasn’t been present at these fret sessions, thankfully; he’d either be full of injured pride over the matter, or else he’d start developing his own set of worries.)

Their Wednesday night church teacher loves how my boys choose to sit together and help each other out. One night, she initially thought Sam was trying to manipulate Gabe about an earned prize, convincing him for his own reasons not to trade with another boy, but it turned out that Sam was able to see the writing on the wall and knew that his brother was going to regret the trade and be sad; he was right, of course, though he couldn’t stop the sequence of events by himself. The teacher found it touching, yet it’s all part of the complicated, loving relationship those two share. As Eric once described his own childhood relationship with his older brother, “Nobody got to beat up on me except my brother.” Ah, testosterone.

Unrelated, I’m still getting over a slight cold I picked up at the end of our trip, and I woke up this morning with limited ability to vocalize. Should make choir practice interesting tonight.