Love and Affliction

Nigel tickling Amber - we are not sure if she is laughing or crying
Our children seem to love each other very much, and they show their immense affection by irritating the heck out of each other and doing things such as:
  • Poking one another without warning
  • Kicking each other in the shins under the table
  • Copying what the other person says
  • Calling names like "Dumb Dumb" and "Silly Nincompoop"
  • Squirting each other with their sports waterbottles
The list goes on ...

Sometimes they gang up on each other and we don't know who the enemy is. The battle is constantly moving and the lines are constantly being redrawn - plans are changed and strategies (for irritation) are devised and revised.

I think their initial motives are just pure love for one another and that pure love is so overwhelming that it actually needs to be expressed physically - first by hugging and that degrades naturally to tickling and then water-bottle squirting.

We do not drive an MPV so the three of them sit in the backseat next to each other. On the (very regular) occasion that a war breaks out in the car, it can cause a less experienced driver to swerve into oncoming traffic and crash in a fiery accident that would leave few survivors - thankfully I am a great driver and no such thing has happened yet. But think about it, look at that picture above of Nigel tickling Amber, throw Shannon into the mix and imagine them all doing that into a single cramped backseat of a car and you can imagine that the swaying and bumping actions can result in changes to the physical movement (according to Newton's laws of motion) of the car as it tries to hurtle down the road in a straight line.

To be honest, I don't really know what to do to handle such fights, mainly because
  • I don't know who started it
  • I don't know who's in the right and who's in the wrong
  • I have no idea what they are screaming about and in what language it is
  • In the movies when such things happen, the parents also tend to not know what to do (but those are Americans)
I always think back to the episodes of Animal Planet when lion/tiger cubs play-fight among each other on the grassy plains of the African savanna and the commentator says that those are actually useful training for their adulthood when they either have to hunt for prey or defend themselves against enemies.

So I leave them to fight it out thinking that one day they might become UFC fighters or maybe lawyers.