Reply to Please be gentle/positive: 8 year age gap

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[quote=Anonymous]I have three kids with an almost 10 year age gap between the oldest and youngest and an almost 7 year between middle and youngest.  My kids are all very close.  They enjoy all being together and they have separate relationships between them that are also close.  The youngest has the oldest two wrapped around her little finger.  They basically ignored her as a baby - neither older kid liked holding the baby or doing things for her.  But, when she hit toddlerhood, it all changed and they just loved playing with her.

As a little kid, they would push her around on those ride on toys.  They would sit her on tonka trucks and push her across the kitchen (yes, I had to stop that one).  They always made sure she had great Christmases.  They would lay in bed with her on Christmas eve or the night before Easter so that she didn't discover that Santa and the Easter bunny weren't real.  They taught her to roller blade before she was out of diapers

When she hit elementary school, I discovered that they had put these pole things on the back of their bike so they could take her places, another thing that gave me a heart attack.  They were the ones that got her to jump off the high dive at the pool.

As teenagers and end of elementary years forward, the three of them would spend evenings together on the trampoline or on hoverboards in the kitchen - parents were excluded so I have no idea what they talked about.  Now that the older kids drive, they take my youngest anywhere she wants to go whenever she wants to go.  She never asks me first to take her somewhere because they are more likely to say yes.

Anyway, so it has worked out well in our family.  One thing I did was that we never slowed down just because we had a new baby.  That baby went everywhere on my back.  I hiked to the bottom of Bryce Canyon and on glaciers in Alaska with a baby on my back.  I went to PTA meetings and school conferences with her on my back.  We were not a slave to the nap - she had to learn to survive in our family, which she did like a champ.  So, the older kids didn't miss out on things because of her.  [/quote]

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