Best friends make the worst enemies

 Two years and three days. That is the age difference of my two boys. My older one is three and my younger one thinks he is three as well. They ask for each other as soon as they wake up, eat meals together, bath and usually spend a lot of time giggling their heads off.

I could not have asked for a better set of kids except when they want the same thing. Then the waterworks start. The screaming and the whining are enough to make anyone’s blood boil. I am usually acting as a referee deciding who gets what, who had what first, whose toy does it belong too and the list goes on.

In my younger days, my sister and I played together but I mostly remember the vicious fights we had. We fought over everything and I think it is because my parents always picked one kid over the other and didn’t provide a distraction. I’ve learned from this and now I feel like the cruise ship director doling out random activities.

 I know that I am a little harder on the older one as he should know better. Then I think he is only three. But when they fight, I feel the gray hair popping out my head like daisies. My blood pressure goes through the roof, and I don’t know how many times I’ve counted to 10. The kicker is that when the boys fight, they still want to be within an arm’s reach of each other. Should I leave things be and say let boys be boys? What do you do when your kids fight?