Day 4 of Thanksgiving: November 4, 2011

I am thankful for my children.

Sometimes I look at J or K and can see so much of the other in them.  Other times I can only marvel that I gave birth to two such totally different personalities.  They share the same brown hair & dark eyes.  They share their mother's love of sweets, an obsession with cartoons and the same sweet smile.  They are both people-pleasers and want to be friends with everyone.  They are smart, inquisitive, nice, loving children.

If you could be in my house on school mornings, though, the differences between them become glaringly obvious.  J is so much more easygoing than K could ever hope to be.  When I wake him up for school, he will stretch and smile, maybe ask for one more minute, but generally wakes up happy.  (On weekends he's always the first one up, thanks to his Grammie's early bird gene)  He eats his breakfast (whatever I give him), brushes his teeth when I ask him to and will pull on whatever clothes I set out for him.  K, on the other hand, could have coined the phrase "waking up on the wrong side of the bed".  If there's a way to wake this girl up happily, I haven't found it.  She will grunt and grump and pull away from me, she whines and argues, takes forever to choose a breakfast, complains that her socks bother her or her shoes are too loose, and she refuses to hug or kiss me unless I've already taken a shower (apparently bedhead and no makeup turns her off).

Generally they don't even see each other in the morning because J leaves on the bus before I  wake her up.  Today, though, I let him sleep an extra hour and sent him in to wake her up.  I stood outside K's bedroom door and just listened & smiled.  She is nowhere NEAR as grumpy with him as she is with me first thing.  They were laughing and talking and playing around on her bed and it just made my heart melt.  Almost five years and a million miles of personality differences between them means nothing when stacked against the sibling bond.

I am so thankful that God granted me the privilege of being mom to J and K, and I'm so thankful for the love they share for each other.  They fight like cats and dogs, whine and complain about each other and basically act like normal big brother/little sister, but when it comes down to it, the caring they have for each other is evident every day.  It may be a single minute that I would miss if I wasn't watching, but it's still there.