1. How to get showered, clean, and ready for bed, all by themselves. No, Iwould not abandon them to it. Often. But it would be nice to go change into fluffy WAPs (Walking Around Pajamas) while they got through their ablutions, and then we could enjoy a nice story time. Right now, bedtime starts with a headlong race up the stairs whilst I chant “walk! walk! hold the rail!” and ends with me in a soggy exhausted mess. Sandwiched in between is the getting one out of clothes, into the shower, out of the shower, next one into the shower, teeth brushed, allergy meds consumed, hair brushed, and so on. And on.
  2. How to put away their own clean clothes. Yeah, somedayI will want them to assist with the laundry, but the fact is, I don’t mind the sorting, washing, folding bits. Cat can put her things in drawers, but she gets a little loosy-goosy on WHICH drawers. Which makes me CRAZEH. So she has to be supervised. By me. Daddy has a very loose grasp on the “specific drawers for specific things” concept. When we first started dating, I thought his mama left him with a weird gap in his education because he was puzzled by my suggestion that all his socks could go in the same drawer and we could call it “the Sock Drawer.” Now I have met his mama (and adore her, I might add) and I realize this was just a put on. Probably. In any case, Cat owns three plain red long sleeve tshirts because I needed them to go with skirt outfits and daddy kept putting them away with the tights, the pants, or the jeans. In the jeans drawer, they stuck out, leading to the realization that (a) Daddy cannot be trusted to put clothes away; (b) Cat now has three red shirts; (c) I have to re-sort everything now; and (d) He can’t supervise Cat doing it either, because see (a).
  3. Get in the car and buckle without assistance. OK, this is more a Matthew issue. There is a glorious and heady sense of freedom in saying “let’s go” and having the kids load up without having to be hoisted into the car, strapped in, and manuveured around. I long to experience it more fully.
  4. Tell time. For realz. So that “in five more minutes” has meaning to Matthew, and so that “not until next week” has meaning for Catherine.
  5. Sleep in on Saturdays.  I can’t remember when that started for me, but I know for sure that by the time I was in 7th grade (dearheavensdon’tletittakethatlong) I loved me some Saturday morning sleep. Will and his brother would both have slept until late afternoon if not prised from their beds. So it is in their genes, people. One glorious day I will be complaining about having to get them up. I can’t wait.
  6. Not put things in their mouths. I should not admit this, but even Cat still has a tendency to chew on things – pens, bracelets, whatever. Given that the top of my ink pens at school always looked like they had been mauled, I can see where that comes from, which doesn’t help. I am just tired of saying 456 times a day, “Take that out of your mouth.” 
  7. Understand money. See No. 4 – same basic concept. It will be lovely when I can just say, sweetly and lovingly, something like:  well, darling, that gargantuan, brightly colored, oddly shaped bit of plastic that I will never be able to store anywhere that you think your herds of tiny plastic animals cannot live a full life without is $39.99 and no way on the green earth I am spotting you money to bring that into my home. And I won’t have to illustrate adding up how many allowances that will be, because Cat will just know that she doesn’t have the patience to save up that much money and we can just move along.
  8. Sit through movies, reliably. This also mostly a Matthew thing.  Mostly. Blondie definitely has her moments too of just not being comfortable any more sitting in the nice theater seats. Or of having to pee, right now, or of running out of water and, yes, that is the parched sound of dehydration in her voice… It will be lovely when they will turn into silent vidiots from time to time and let me watch a stinkin’ Disney flick all the way through.
  9. Pack their own lunches. Yeah, I never did that, I was spoiled rotten. They are totally going to have to do that, since The Dirt School has no cafeteria.
  10. Get sucked into a good book. Cat’s reading skills are now up to the task of reading to herself, but she doesn’t really like it. She prefers to read to any audience she can commandeer Matthew. I can’t wait until my kids want to curl up on the sofa and growl at people who try to pull them from their story.