Brothers don’t shake hands, brothers gotta fight!
2 min readOct 6, 2016
Here’s a not-very-short list of the things my sons Colt (5) and Cam (3) fought over yesterday evening, starting from the time I got home until they went to bed (only 3 hours later):
Inanimate objects:
- A plastic clothes hanger. Cam: “mommy gave it to me!”. Colt: “It’s my turn!”
- 3/4 of a broken cardboard box
- A mini plastic yellow flashlight (much better than green apparently)
- The red water bottle (again, green sucks)
- The other 1/4 of the broken cardboard box
- Magna-tiles. Who gets them, which colors, what stays built, etc. In fairness, magna-tiles are awesome and worth fighting over
- The green flashlight (now somehow superior to yellow)
- What kind of burritos I should make (Colt: “I want eggs.” Cam: “I want chicken.” Colt: “I want eggs and chicken”)
- Burrito w/ eggs #1, which is seemingly identical to burrito w/ eggs #2. Nevermind the chicken burritos sitting uneaten.
Words
- Colt (with a smirk): “Cam is bad”. Cam (very whiney): “I’m not bad!”
- Whether Colt is going to “get” Cam
- Who won
- Who lost
- Multiple unintelligible things
- Whether or not “that’s fair”
- My personal favorite → Colt (through tears): “Cam’s not letting me talk to him”
Actual, physical fights
- Colt: “Cam poked me in the eye…on purpose!”
- Sword fighting with pieces of the cardboard box
- “Hug tackle”. That’s what they call it, and it’s exactly what you think it is
- Whose at fault when their heads smash together during the hug tackle
Privileges:
- Who gets to explain Cam’s preschool project to mommy
- Who gets a very specific (but evolving) spot on our massive sofa
- Who gets to turn off mommy’s breast pump (yup, seriously)
Hard to believe two people could fight about so much over the course of one evening and still be best friends afterwards (and intermittently during). Thankfully, baby Clara didn’t fight with anyone about anything. Because, seriously, who would ever fight someone with a face like that?
