Birth Order Blues

I meant to put this one up a while ago, but as usual life got in the way. So now I have a couple cute little "Joel" things to post. He seems to be the kid that comes up with the funny lines, without even knowing it. So here goes:

The other night when we were putting the kids to bed, we let Ethan stay up a little longer than the other two to read with his book light. Well, as you might guess this didn't go over very well with the other two, but Joel especially had a difficult time with it. We tried explaining to him that Ethan was 9 and he was still four and that when the new baby came he would get to do things before the baby. That seemed to help a little, so we left the room. While we were gone, the kids must have continued the conversation because the next thing we knew Joel was crying at the top of his voice, "Its not fair that Ethan will get to drive a car first!" He was having a serious case of birth order blues and no words could change the fact that he would always be younger than his big brother.

These two make me say, "aahhh":
I'm not sure the context of this next little line from Joel, but maybe I asked him to come give me a hug or something and he was busy. Then he said, "You know Mama, I still love you, even when I'm adult and I move out I'll still love you". Then today, Anthony was trying to distract Joel by asking him an out of the blue question and said, "Joel, when you grow up what will your wife's name be?" To which Joel responded, "I'm not going to have a wife." Then Anthony said, "Don't you want to marry someone like mommy?" And Joel responded, "Daddy, there is no one else like mommy."

As the stories above illustrate, Joel has a huge dose of youngest child charm that seems to help him along (he just doesn't know it yet). I guess one of these days, he might be able to appreciate his place in the birth order and realize that each spot has its own pros and cons.