Together Again

It's kind of noisy in the dining room just now. Dd24 came over to do her laundry (it's free when you use Mom's washer and dryer) and to hang out with dd16 and ds14, and they're making a gingerbread house from one of those kits every store seems to carry these days.

I love when they can spend time together like this. It reminds me of the days when they were young and all of them still lived at home. At Christmastime, they'd all work together to decorate Christmas cookies, or to make gift tags, or some other Christmas craft. It's hard to find something that everyone can do when your kids span a wide age range like mine do, but whenever they found something to do together, they all had fun.

Ds14 is finally old enough to work with everyone else; when he was young, he'd often just watch, happy to be included in whatever the older kids were doing. Now he's quite opinionated about how to do things, and it's fun to watch.

I often think that homeschooling allowed us to make more than the usual number of memories when the kids were young, but I never realized that growing up together 24/7, with no school attendance intruding on family time, would help them appreciate their time together now that they're grown (or almost grown). Looks like all those years together paid off.