Middle Child is going to University!

2 years ago, in one of my first posts, I wrote about Firstborn Son leaving home. Like everything about the second child, I suspect this transition is going to be the same but different, some things easier, some harder, but none of them quite as bewildering. Let’s go back to the beginning…

A second pregnancy is usually less of a rollercoaster. You can more or less count on your body to do its thing.  But you realise you had forgotten about many of the inconveniences of pregnancy.  Like having to choose between eating or breathing on any given day. Breathing involves expanding your squished lungs, eating means temporarily enlarging your compressed stomach, and neither seems plausible in the third stage of pregnancy.  And there are new challenges now: you thought you were tired when gestating Firstborn Son, but you now realise you had zero clue how easy you had it, when you could slob out and chillax after work and during weekends.  You haven’t had a lie-in for two and a half years. You are owed thousands of hours of sleep. If, like me, you were an on-call homebirth midwife, you’d regularly get called at night, thus exacerbating the problem.

Being a midwife, you know this second birth will be easier than the marathon that was your first. You weren’t wrong about that, you even got your idyllic waterbirth at home but… you also discovered the hideous intensity (aka pain) of doing so without a lovely epidural!

Your baby instinctively latches onto your we’ve-done-this-before boobs. You don’t have to spend your days expressing your milk into syringes so you can squirt it down your baby’s throat because sucking is for losers. Which is just as well because your toddler barely tolerates the time your vastly more efficient second born takes up to feed; time you ought to be spending entertaining him. Besides, you have sing-and-sign to get to (where you get to sing The Wheels on the Bus and other such classics having given your pre-lingual toddler some kind of noisy percussion instrument so they can drown out your unenthusiastic voice).   It turns out that most of these activities are organised by well-meaning morning larks who believe that 10am is a reasonable time to start. They are wrong. It wasn’t good when you only had to get Firstborn Son ready; it’s well nigh impossible now that he has a baby brother. I need to eat breakfast, provide breakfast and be breakfast; then I have to find suitable, clean, weather-appropriate clothes for three, I have to get dressed, dress one, and convince the third to co-operate… I have to pack the nappy bag which now has to deal with code-brown emergencies in 2 different (and constantly changing) sizes. It’s not rocket science, but it is sodding time-consuming.

Potty training is underway for the toddler, and you struggle to teach him to use big boy pants. You realise with a sickening lurch in your stomach that in a few short years, you’re going to be repeating this gruelling exercise in extreme patience and depressingly low levels of compliance despite, preposterous levels of bribery that you’d sworn you’d never resort to. Your washing machine is not happy. It’s asking to unionise. It remembers when it did one or two loads of barely dirty loads per week. It feels exploited. As do you.

Things settle down and you get number two into some kind of routine in which you reclaim your evenings (if not your nights) and the number of incontinent children goes back down to one.

Reclaiming your nights turns out to be somewhat more complicated because you were worried about waking Firstborn Son if you let middle child cry. You couldn’t bear the prospect of 2 wakeful children at 2am. You eventually realised that Firstborn Son could probably sleep through hurricanes and was blissfully unresponsive to a baby’s cries. Since you’ve left it a bit late, sleep training this second baby requires a bit more grit and dogged determination. He is not amused by the new system. But he too is a French baby (they sleep at night, it’s a thing!) He figures it out.

Some things were easier. Once you’d sorted schooling for your Firstborn, the door is open for all your subsequent progeny. For better or worse, you opted for French school because you’re going to need all the help you can get two boys speaking another language.  But they are French children. They figure it out. By the time middle child starts Petite Section, you are beginning to understand how it works. You can recite classic French poetry, write in beautiful cursive script, and you’ve made (uneasy) peace with the Wednesday afternoon half day (and the 16 weeks of school holidays).

Homework will ever remain your bugbear. Neither Firstborn Son nor Middle Child show the slightest inclination to get involved. But where you fought tooth and nail to get Firstborn Son to complete his assignments (not gonna lie, you may have done some of the more onerous projects yourself, you got decent enough grades and they weren’t going to get done any other way) you slacked off a little where Middle Child was concerned. You did have the time and resilience to chase the first homework-shy one around the house, tie him to his chair, and breathe down his neck until it was done to a semi-decent standard, but you couldn’t do it for both. By then, you were broken. You somehow still had to fit in after school activities, music lessons and practice, and the ever repetitive and tedious bedtime routine.  Healthy meals (always vastly under-appreciated) reasonable hygiene, a story or three and a sensible bedtime seemed like enough to be getting on with on any given evening. 

By the time the Pandemic hit, middle child may have lost what little academic focus he’d managed to acquire. All the teachers’s efforts were concentrated on GCSE and A level year groups (your Firstborn benefited although he did do lots of independent studying so kudos to him) but your middle child felt this was a bonus holiday. You were busy chasing Only Daughter, tying her to her chair and breathing down her neck, trying to maintain some kind of education, you couldn’t do it for both. Such is the life of a middle child… he did write and produce his first song (https://youtu.be/1PVCang-i54?si=UaZFWaA7nrRoAVYV) in that period, so that was something. Now I know I’m biased, but it’s pretty darn good.

Music always came naturally to him. Where I’d have to cajole, beg, bribe, threaten Firstborn Son to practice the piano (seeing, as I could, that he had talent aplenty, if only I could help him unlock it) middle child took to his guitar like a duck to water. It was cool, and so was he. Obviously he was averse to music grades, but to my eternal credit (and perhaps theirs too, I cannot lie!) these were taken, and passed, by both boys.

His GCSE exam season was spent learning how to DJ because it was “necessary” for him to acquire proficiency in time for the big End-of-Exams party. Which he helped organise, also at the expense of revision. Hindsight proved what I’d predicted, namely that this wasn’t such a good idea. But the party was awesome. Not least because the music was top notch! 

His A Levels were undertaken with more maturity than his GCSEs but the social butterfly/party animal in him was never completely tamed. No-one ever needed to break him out of his cocoon of adolescent awkwardness.

And then, this summer, he obtained A levels. And a place at University.

He is ready to fly! 

I’m not sure he is fully house trained, but he is very independent and he can cook from scratch if he has to. Such is the life of a middle child.

With both boys at Uni, the house is going to be quiet. And perma-tidy. Only Daughter will be an only child! The washing machine will breathe. Tesco’s profits will plummet.

Bring on Christmas!