We got the call the morning after the official start of summer and the day before the actual due date. Our son-in-law phoned that Friday to say that our daughter was in the Port Perry Hospital maternity ward and contractions were coming fairly quickly. A couple of hours later – at 8:52 a.m., June 22 – her third baby was born. And we were grandparents for a fourth time. A few hours after that, we were in the hospital room, holding him, enjoying his first sounds and wondering.
“Have you decided on a name?” my wife asked.
“His name is Wyatt James Massey,” our daughter answered, “We’re not sure how it will be received, but we like it.
“I love it,” my wife said and she meant it.
It didn’t take my mind long to start playing with the new names in our lives. My being the history buff, I immediately thought of the 19th century crime investigator and law enforcement officer Wyatt Earp, famous in the U.S. Old West for his marksmanship and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in October 1881. Ironically, Earp had three brothers, one of whom was named James. But having thought a bit more about the name Wyatt and then James, my Wild West-focused brain suddenly arrived at one of Earp’s contemporaries, outlaw Jesse James. But that’s where my name game stopped.
Not long after we arrived in our daughter’s recovery room, so too did her other two children – Layne (almost five) and Sawyer (almost three) – and suddenly I was thinking about completely different relationships, characters and times. The older two children were eager to see their new little brother, particularly big sister Layne, who held him, rocked him and even sang a make-it-up-as-you-go lullaby to him until the baby got a little restless and began to cry.
“I think you better take him now,” she said wisely.
But that extraordinary contact had been made. Periodically, over the next few days, as baby Wyatt arrived home and his two sleepless parents began to acclimatize to a new personality in their midst, so too did their two older children. As in other three-children households, it was a ready-made family situation, with existing tempos and rhythms, established dynamics and power relationships. There will be all those negotiations later about gaining attention, sharing portions, who gets to stay up latest, why the eldest has to wait for the youngest to be attended to and who loves whom the most.
What was clear right away in our daughter’s and son-in-law’s changing environment was – as much as possible – this was an equal time household. Wyatt’s parents made certain that both the older children got lots of attention right away. Of course, it’s early days, but I don’t think I was as conscious of the equity, as our kids are. I was impressed.
I grew up with one sibling, a sister. So did my wife. And we raised two children. Our son-in-law grew up as the youngest of three brothers, so he certainly has an understanding (at least on the receiving end) about life in a three-child home. For me it’s an entirely new experience witnessed at close range, sort of like Parenting-Times-Three 101. A few days into life returning to normal around their household, my wife and I stopped by for another visit. Of course, there were the usual greetings from the two older grandchildren – “Hi Gran! Hi Popou!” delivered at the top of their voices – to the delight of their grandparents.
But it wasn’t until we had offered our hushed responses, fearing that the shouts might wake up the baby, that we realized baby Wyatt was asleep in a bassinette just metres from the front door. He was sleeping through whatever was going on. Perhaps that’s another of the training tricks that our kids understand, but which I never learned. Don’t shield the little one from the realities of a household with two busy adults and now three children in need of attention 24/7.
Still my mind returned this week to other historical precedents for this new guy and his siblings. I began thinking about famous trios – both real and imagined – such as Peter, Paul and Mary, Three Little Pigs, The Three Stooges, and even Chico, Harpo and Groucho, The Marx Brothers. Finally, I thought about The Three Musketeers, thanks originally to their creator, novelist Alexandre Duma. I thought about the three kids sharing adventures, being “one for all and all for one.” But to be even more accurate, I got thinking about them because The Three Musekteers are really four characters. They are D’Artagnon and The Three Musketeers.
Because, you see, our older daughter’s three kids have a cousin who’s one and a half. We all anticipate that when the four of them get together, life will definitely become an adventure.
