I’m sorry to have been so quiet lately. My silence wasn’t intentional. This family’s life has been so full that I simply ran out of time to visit this space and share Kit and Jack’s forth birthday party, or Archie’s first day of school with a new teacher and how nervous it seemed to make him, or how Jack cried all the way home when he had to move his monkey on the stoplight at school to mark his transgression against his classroom’s rules, or how Kit sat at the breakfast table just this morning and sang a song about fathers she learned at school over the phone to her own dad who is away on business, or how excited all three kids are to ride their new bicycles around our cul-de-sac again and again and again each afternoon. It’s as if I’ve been moving through our days, stopping only momentarily to collect a memory or two and cache it away for safekeeping.

But I’ll be more open this month. Partly because I have so much I’d like to say, and partly because Tricia has issued her 31 for 21 Blog Challenge again. I’m accepting her challenge, and so I’ll be back tomorrow and the day after that, and then again the day after that. I promise to say something, but I can’t commit to sharing only cogent thoughts. It seems I’ve mostly run out of time for that.

So until tomorrow I’ll leave you with this story. It isn’t singularly Archie’s story, as maybe it should be in the spirit of 31 for 21, rather it’s mostly Kit’s story, an illustration of what being Archie’s sibling means for her.

Archie still wears a diaper most of the time. We are working on going to the bathroom on the toilet consistently, but right now this is where Archie is in this area of his development. He has many other strengths so this potty-training thing doesn’t bother me as you may expect it would. It simply is what it is and then it’s nothing more.

I’m telling you this so you won’t be surprised when I write that earlier this week Archie threw a diaper filled with pieces of poop down the steps, into the foyer. I was folding laundry atop the kitchen island when I smelled poop and knew someone must have gone and that the someone was most likely Archie. That was when I turned to Kit, who was working near me at our table, and asked her to go find her brother and come back to tell me if he was the one who’d pooped. I knew Archie wouldn’t come if I called him because he believes hiding his poop and then hiding from me is really funny, so I’d decided that sending Kit after her brother would afford me a minute or two more to finish folding the laundry.

I worked my way through our family’s shirts and pants, underwear and pajamas, before Kit returned. I knew that probably meant something was awry, so I set out to find Kit and Archie before I went about the business of putting everything away. I saw Kit before I came up Archie. She was collecting the pieces of poop that had fallen out of that diaper I mentioned early, the one that Archie had tossed into the foyer from the top of the steps.

Later, after I sent Kit on her way so I could clean up the mess myself, after I’d rinsed Archie off in the tub in my bathroom and dressed him in clean clothing, I found Kit in her room, coloring in a princess sticker book while she listened to the voice of some cartoon princess croon wistfully from the CD playing in the pink, plastic stereo that sits on the nightstand beside Kit’s bed.

“Thank you for helping me with Archie,” I told my daughter. She wouldn’t look up from her work as I spoke to her. “Next time tell me when something’s happened and I’ll do the dirty work, ok? I didn’t mean for you to have to do that.”

Kit never stopped coloring to look at me. She only nodded her head and um-hummed her agreement. Later that night when I explained to John what had happened, how Kit had helped her brother and me, Kit shied away from her father’s praise and accepted our adulation with obvious embarrassment. Because of Kit’s hesitancy to discuss the subject, John and I dropped it and didn’t mention it again.

Yesterday in the car on our way to pick up Archie, Kit shared a story with me about how she’d told one of her friends at school about her brother. “They asked me, ‘Oh, is he older or younger?’” Kit explained from the backseat. “So I telled my friend, ‘He is a older brudder, but sometimes he is a younger one, too.’”