Whose is whose?

Luke and Jasper's biggest challenge these days seems to be coming to terms with the injustice of their life circumstance. Nothing is ever fair, especially not when it comes to their material possessions. For the first couple years of their lives, we pretty much believed that having two of everything was required for sanity. We quickly learned that to have only one of any given toy was worse than to have none. It's not that we didn't want the kids to have to share (clearly, they had been learning how to share from the moment they were conceived), it's just that the constant struggle over things wasn't worth it. Plus, they really seemed to enjoy playing with their toys more if they were both playing with the same thing. The joy would exponentially increase as they watched each other enjoy a certain object while simultaneously enjoying it themselves.

Jaz and Luke, Cape Cod, June 2007

Then, sometime around their second birthday, it all started to shift. It wasn't enough to just have two matching somethings. The boys wanted to have ownership over a particular something. We had to start writing their initials on their matching toys so that they could be sure of which one was theirs. This solution worked for a couple of years, but around age 4, it began to fail.

Luke and Jaz no longer enjoyed having all the same toys. They wanted to have different toys. But having different toys came with a whole new set of problems. One of the two toys would inevitably be "cooler" than the other. And then they both wanted the cooler toy. And it wasn't fair. One kid would scheme up a way to convince his brother to trade, and the kids would take turns being devastated about the situation. This is pretty much where things stand today. Nothing is fair, and nothing can ever possibly be fair. Getting two of the same toy is not a viable solution because then they won't know whose is whose (labeling isn't an option anymore). But some toys are just too cool for one kid to have and not the other. So they decide that they shouldn't get it at all. But that's not fair either.

The past few days have been blurred by impressive heat and Luke and Jasper's ongoing squabbles over toys. What belongs to who. Whose toy is cooler. What toys they wish they had instead. I should mention that the vast majority of our family toys belong to no one in particular, and are open-ended toys that encourage joint play. But for some reason, it's the few small things (the Playmobil guys, the Thomas trains) that are the most prized possessions and the source of most of our toy trouble.

And now we are packing up the car with 5 days worth of food, our huge tent, enough beach towels for a family of 12, sleeping bags and pillows and air mattresses galore, and 4 outfits per kid per day. We are bringing 3 yellow buckets and 3 blue shovels and leaving the rest of the toys behind. We will soak in the sun and the ocean air and 4 days without material objects and the conflict that they provoke in our kids.

I'm going to guess that we'll have at least an hour of peace on the beach before we hear about a certain rock that's more beautiful than another certain rock, and the injustice of the ocean for only tossing one such perfect rock up onto the shore. Good luck to us.