Some Journey

Joseph

Joseph is my fourth child. One of the things that amazes me about having five kids is that there are no repeats. I used to kind of think of the world in two categories, type A and type B. I figured that out of five kids you'd get two A's, two B's and one mixture A/B. Not so. Five distinctive personalities. They definitely have things in common, and there are pair ups which share more commonalities than others. Joseph is terrified of dogs and cats. But reptiles. . .loves them. He loves to be read to, but rarely looks at books himself. He doesn't like to color. Not a huge fan of ball games. But his favorite thing in the world to play with is a worm. He loves worms. He will spend hours digging in the dirt looking for them, then carries them around all day playing with them. He builds houses out of blocks for them, tries to feed them all sort of things, puts them in toy cars. This one he gave a bath. View image
Then he usually smashes them. Or chops them in half. It is almost less an affection for worms that he has, more of a fascination. He is, however, our most affectionate kid. He loves to be held and hugged and kissed and tickled. And it's pretty hard to resist hugging and kissing him a lot. He's a very sweet and lovable kid, until he doesn't get his way. I'm sure no one else has a kid like that. Anyway, the biggest downside to Joseph is the eardrum bursting, high pitch scream that he emits when he cries. And here lately that seems to be rather often. He's decided he doesn't want to be four. He wants to be a baby again. Fortunately, I've already had three four year olds and I know this is normal. But I'm ready to get it over with and move on to that fun time of age 4 1/2- 5 where they discover how fun it is to be a big kid and they seem to become sponges of higher levels of thinking over night. On the other hand, I'm not rushing Joseph to grow up. He made a really adorable preschooler, and now that those are becoming more and more scarce around here, I don't mind putting up with the discipline challenges that go with it. In the meantime, we'll learn to live with lots of worms.