Nature Boy and Sneaky Sue

I really feel like my two youngest need "daring duo" names. When they are together, they have this powerful alliance with each other which enables them to play together for hours without interruption - unless, of course, they are interrupted by an older sibling of theirs... (He often breaks in on their fun with literal destruction, but it's hard for me to be upset with him because I know it's difficult to be on the outside, watching those two have all the fun... even if it IS Barbies and baby dolls, and in reality he gets bored after a few minutes in their company.)

But Andrew and Sarah have a bond that continues to astonish me, even as it draws up memories of my own two youngest siblings, who were also quite the pair in their day. Andrew still sobs when Sarah leaves for school (or when he discovers that she has already left, and he slept through it), and he lights up with all the world's joy when I tell him it's time to get the big kids at the end of the school day. This morning, he spent the drive to preschool mumbling through some story about why he's mad at Sarah, but I'm pretty sure that in threenager jargon, being "mad" at someone is just another level of deep kinship and loyalty.

And as for Sarah, I keep expecting that any day now, she will decide she's getting too old for her little bother and start shutting him out of her activities, but thankfully that apocalypse has yet to occur. Instead, she continues to band with him for All the Adventures, whether it's a cardboard spaceship or a stuffed animal fashion show. They cook together in the play kitchen, construct cities together with the Duplos, and sketch together for hours - or until the dog has stolen all the paper and pencils that they inevitably have left within his reach.

And truly, those two fit together quite well. Andrew is brash and fearless and completely without shame. (Yesterday morning, he played upstairs for close to an hour buck naked... every time he'd come to the landing to "show me somefing," I'd bark at him to put on clothes, but he would only peer down at me with distant amusement - and then walk off with no intention of obedience. He finally caved when I started suggesting that he must really love to be naked - I think I hit too close to home - and then the next time he appeared with clothes on, and loudly shouted, "TA DA!!" as if he had succeeded in curing cancer or something.) Andrew jumps wholeheartedly into any of his sister's schemes, even when it involves him being tied around the neck with a leash or some other such atrocity - not so much because he adores her and will do anything for her (although that's true), but mostly because he's just totally up for anything that might possibly be fun. What a tremendous and terrifying thought...

Sarah, on the other hand, is my reserved girl, carefully plotting every move and every word, casting those lovely eyes of hers about sharply as she deliberates. She is fierce and silly and creative in her own way, not so much imaginative as just drawn to create, and she is the stubbornest of my children. I remember realizing once when she was really little - just beginning to walk and talk - how easily she would try to deceive us in order to get her own way about something. At the time, I was absolutely SHOCKED that my perfect, beautiful, sweet girl would tell a FALSEHOOD to her own MOTHER without batting an EYE. But then again, as Becky Brooks once said, we have yet to birth a Savior in this family... Sarah still sometimes struggles with truth-telling because she is a master at crafting her stories and revealing only what she chooses to reveal, but mercifully, her heart is good, and she is old enough at least to know better... and we're working on it. One day perhaps that will be a gift she uses most often for good. Until then, it is invaluable in her schemes with Nature Boy, and so I do my best to hold her to the truth when it's important, but let them run wild with their passions and plotting as much as possible.

So if you're driving by and see them hanging from the branches of the crepe myrtle, or digging in a corner of the backyard, or perhaps you'll even hear them loudly singing Moana songs in Sarah's bedroom - then please think nothing of it. It's just another day of saving the world for Nature Boy and Sneaky Sue....

**Fun Fact: "Sue" was the other name we'd considered for Sarah. Susanna, really, but she would've been Sue, in memory of one of my favorite teachers - and in retrospect, she is much like Mrs. Brophy, who always had a twinkle in her eye and a taste for excitement, adventure, and intrigue. As well as an eagerness to befriend young children and lead them on incredible expeditions of thought and fancy...