With age comes wisdom

For as long as he can remember, AJ has always wanted to be bigger. To be older. Some of his best friends are six months older, and he wants to catch up to them. He knows he has to finish high school before he can be a brave Army soldier, and so he wants to grow old enough to do that.

But all of a sudden he's discovered that older isn't always better. "It's not fair," he told me as we arrived home last night. "I have to go to school five days a week, and Sydney only has to go three days."

And not only that, the homework he has to do in first grade isn't nearly fun as what his sister is bringing home from preschool. While he has to work on a spelling assignment...

Sydney gets to jump over boxes. Seriously. One of Sydney's take-home projects, obviously geared toward improving coordination and physical activity, was to find various sized boxes and jump over them.

As AJ struggled to understand the concept of creating a code - assigning numbers to letters and writing his spelling words in code, Sydney was leaping and laughing. And driving her brother crazy with jeaolousy.

Which made for a wonderful incentive. We saved the boxes for when AJ finished his assignment.

So AJ was happy in the end. But it got me thinking. When is it really better to be older? With age comes ever-increasing responsibility.Throughout school he will always have harder homework. And then he'll move on to college and into the real world, and - while he'll certainly enjoy more freedom - he'll again have greater responsibility than his little sister. The best he can look forward to is that someday she'll catch up. God forbid she somehow manages to retire before him. Then there'd be no justice in this world.

Hmmm... perhaps it's because I've often commented that being grown up isn't as fun as I'd thought it would be. That makes it kind of hard to offer comfort. I better just stick to offering boxes as a distraction.