Jillian is my middle kid. This may or may not be the reason she CRAVES one and one time. It's not always easy, she does get the short end of the stick in some ways. Leah naturally gets a lot of time alone with me because we are together a few days each week either hanging out at home or running errands and doing things like storytime at the library. Kyle is up later than the girls which gives him an hour or so each night without the girls (he just doesn't need as much sleep as they do...in fact my crazy son has never needed as much sleep as most kids). Plus he's older so we're able to do different things with Kyle, like watching the Back to the Future trilogy which we did recently in the late evenings after the girls were tucked into bed. On the flip side one could say Jillian gets the best of both worlds...when there's a big kid thing she gets to do it along with Kyle while Leah is told she's too small, and when it's a girl or little kid thing Kyle is the one who is left out (although if it's a girly thing he's happy to be on his own instead of participating).
playing backgammon...Jillian won this game!
There is no natural alone time with Jillian, which means I need to make an effort to do it more often. Right now I make sure Jillian has playtime with her friends without a little tagalong sister and we do reading together each night before bed. But what I really want to do is make sure we get out more and do things together. She just loves going out with Jeff or me without any siblings. Today Leah was invited to a friend's house for the afternoon so we left the boys at home to play video games, dropped Leah off at Emily's house for a playdate, then Jillian and I hit the mall. We wandered around stores Jillian likes, she got a new pair of shorts for gymnastics from her favourite store and we had a snack. It wasn't a long trip or anything very exciting but Jillian didn't mind, she just loved that we were walking around together and chatting.
I recently heard a great saying...kids spell love T-I-M-E. It is so true.
