Day 11: Modern Day Bickering

I was looking through old texts tonight with my 11-year-old daughter. We were cracking up at some of the texts she and her brothers have sent me, especially the ones where they were fighting.

The two boys seem to go at it the most. Justin, the 9-year-old is particularly dramatic in his text exchanges. You can see that my responses are super empathetic. We tried to go out for a date night,
and received this text early in the evening.

A few hours later:

I think you can sense from my tone here how I feel about this kind of interruption.

After school is when they really go at it. Usually the dispute centers around technology, whether it's laptops or TVs.

Another after school message. A few days before, someone had given each kid a handful of mints and Justin had one left that had been sitting on the counter for days. Until this happened:

Most recently, I received (read the bottom text first).

It's easy for me to laugh at these, to keep it in perspective. I remember when my sisters and I used to do the same thing to our parents. They'd be at their friend's house playing cards, or my mom would be at work, and one of us would call my mom crying (we NEVER did it to Dad. Seems my kids have inherited that instinct as their dad never gets these texts). Like me now, she'd barely tolerate the nonsense. 

As crazy as these little tiffs make me, I'm comforted in knowing that these are valuable lessons the kids are learning about how to coexist, how to work through conflict (how to bug their mom? They've mastered that one). My sisters are my best friends now, so I know this is all part of building the foundation of their future friendships. 

In the meantime, I'm comforted knowing that for the fifth night in a row the boys asked to sleep in the same room together, pulling out the trundle and softly chatting until I hollered up at them to go to sleep. I think we'll be okay.