Sometimes, the only peace and quiet available to a parent is cowering underneath the covers in your bed.  Here is where my first husband and I found ourselves one afternoon, when our oldest was about 6 and our middle child was about 3 and a half.  Apparently, at this stage in life, our oldest felt it was her duty and responsibility in life to assume the roll of assistant mom to her younger siblings.  Our middle child, however, felt it her mission in life to be our comic relief star. She was specialized in constantly badgering her older sibling, just to see what would happen, lol. 

As we lay in our room seeking solace, we could distantly hear these two going back and forth verbally with one another over something.  We both cracked up at how funny they sounded.  We hesitated to get involved for several reasons.  One reason was because we encouraged our children to try learning to communicate and work out their differences.  The second reason was because it was just way too much fun for us to listen to them trying to sound adult. 

Suddenly though, it became uncomfortably quiet for a moment, followed by a bit of a scuffle sound.  From the silence that followed the sound, we could hear our middle child whispering a panicked and desperate “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” to our oldest, as the fall of footsteps could be heard heading our way.  The desperate whispering continued as my oldest paraded herself loudly down the stairs to our room.  As she reached the bottom of the landing outside our doorway, we could see her stop, turn to look at her sister, and so that we could hear her clearly, she loudly announced, “It’s not sorry time now”, mimicking me!

We were laughing so hard at how well she could impersonate me, that we didn’t hear her tell us what had happened, and to this day I cannot say that I recall what the offending child had actually ever done to her sibling…