The Referee Stage

When my wife was pregnant...all we wanted was the kids to arrive.

Then all we wanted was to be done with nursing and 3 hour wake-up screams.

Then it was the bottles and the crawling, the diapers and the darn plastic obstacles (the swing, the exer-saucer). Finally these burdens all faded. In fact, now we are almost totally done with diapers as my 2.25 year old daughter looks very precocious with the potty.

But the hurdles never end. Now all I do is REFEREE my two kids. They fight constantly: physically, verbally, even psychologically. I am beyond trying to teach them how to get along. What I do is put one mischievous kid in one corner of the house and the other as far away as I can. Only then does peace have a fighting chance at a 5 minute reign.

My kids have a knack, make that an Olympian talent for annoying each other. They both know EXACTLY what to do to send the other into a fiery rage.

Obviously, they inherited this proclivity from their mother's gene pool.