“Maybe that baby just doesn't want me to be able to play games at all anymore!”

This was my precocious pre-schooler's unfortunate analysis of the situation a few days ago, when the baby had been screaming her head off for about three hours and no one in the house could really do much of anything but try to deal with it.

So, is this sibling rivalry, the bane of parenthood? I'm not so sure. Just an hour later the same kid spontaneously told me that she loved her baby sister, so how bad can it really be? But in her previous comment, I could see the urge to personalize the difficult situation in which we all found ourselves that afternoon. The baby's screaming was making it so I couldn't play with her, and the sheer overwhelming noise of it was demoralizing to her attempts to entertain herself. So she jumped to the conclusion that it must have been deliberate, a conspiracy by her baby sister to prevent her from playing.

We've been blessed so far on that particular issue, because despite all the changes to her life since the new baby joined our family, my oldest daughter has generally been completely adoring of her. If she gets mad at anyone about the decrease in the attention paid to her, it's me and her mom. Her sister, up until now, has been spared the blame. So, even though there isn't much I can really do, I'll be paying close attention to how this one develops.