The New Normal

I walked into the room with Talitha in my arms. She had just woken up for the morning. Zianne was already up, sitting on the couch watching Daniel Tiger with a sippy cup of milk in her hand. She looked up briefly, “Hi sissy,” and turned her gaze back to the screen.

I sat down to nurse the babe and it struck me… after months of transitioning to life with two kids, after painstaking weeks of teaching Zianne to be “gentle” to sissy and enduring her toddler tantrums as she adjusted to sharing attention with a sibling… we were settling into normal.

Talitha is no longer new. Her presence is no longer disruptive to Zianne. Life with a little sis is Z’s normal. It took a few months, but I am pretty sure Zianne can no longer remember her life before Talitha arrived in it.

Surely, the hardest part of Talitha’s arrival was helping Zianne adjust. Her smooches on the baby’s face would often turn into head butts, and we would find ourselves hurriedly separating the sisters we prayed would some day become close companions. As most parents’ probably do after the second child arrives, we’ve been trying to balance our time and our attention – making sure Z still gets one-on-one time with each parent and attempting to savor Talitha’s calm baby days, all while hoping to teach the older that life is better with the younger one in it.

For a while Zianne kept us on our toes. For a few days, we had both car seats together in the backseat, but we soon separated them because we couldn’t trust our forward-facing two year old to keep her hands out of rear-facing sissy’s face as we drove. Z never felt ill-will toward Talitha, just curiosity mixed with anxiety as this new, soft, chubby human took up permanent residence in our house. Zianne would share her toys by thrusting them into Talitha’s face. Or she would kindly try to feed sissy her snacks, forcing us to repeat our new house mantra, “sissy only drinks milk,” at least a hundred times.

Slowly but surely Talitha has become a normal part of everyday life. Zianne shares her toys more gently and loves to lie in the crib next to her sister. She brings Talitha her paci, informs us if T is “crawling” or “crying,” and invites the baby to partake in activities around the house… “C’mon sissy. Let’s go upstairs.”

We crammed the family into the truck this weekend for a trip up to Disneyland, and we had to move the girls’ car seats together to fit everyone in. Today, they sat in the back seat next to each other while we waited outside a restaurant for a to-go order. Zianne grabbed Talitha’s hand and they started playfully pulling on each other’s fingers, gently, happily. Talitha began giggling and Zianne laughed in return. There was no aggression, No anxiety. Just two sisters playing together the way we always imagined. Our new normal is my favorite yet.