Here’s to the next five…!

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo

Image by Rev Dan Catt under the this CC license.

There’s nothing particularly special about five. It’s just a number, nestled between four and six. There’s no real reason why five should take on any more significance than the numbers that precede or follow it, and yet somehow it does.

Five minutes, for example, tends to be a much more significant division of time than, say, 3 minutes or seven minutes. Why? Why do people tend to make five year plans, rather than three year ones? The most destructive tornadoes are ranked F-5 on the Fujita scale, and the worst hurricanes rate as category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Five, five, five!

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we have five digits on each hand and foot that leads us to lend more weight to the number. Who knows?

Some other distinctions enjoyed by the number five: it is the atomic number of boron, the number of books in the Torah, the number of times each day that muslims pray to Allah, the number of oceans in the world, the number of human senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and the number of vowels in the English alphabet, to list but a few.

Of course, when you’re four, with only a week to go until your birthday, five suddenly becomes a very significant number indeed. The little one had been hyper all week, planning her party, changing her mind about this detail or that. No boys, she’d decided… and no adults, except for Mum and Dad, she conceded.

“You two have to come,” she said, “someone has to make the food and mind all the kids.” Charming!

On the morning of her birthday she woke up disappointed. I asked her what was wrong. “I still feel like I’m four Dad,” she explained. Her glum disposition soon lifted when she realised there were presents to be opened. As she unwrapped them I explained that, unlike four-year-olds, five-year-olds were responsible, always did as they were told and helped their mums and dads whenever they were asked. She shot me her best “who are you trying to kid” look and redoubled her assault on the wrapping paper.

After breakfast we got busy in the kitchen preparing for the party that afternoon. The little one was in her element, bossing her older sisters about and generally lording it over everyone. They were sulking. It wasn’t fair, they said, that she got to choose everything, just because it was her birthday. I told them that when their birthday came around they’d get to choose… but that wasn’t fair either, because their birthday wasn’t until November, and besides there were two of them. What could I say… sometimes being a twin sucks! I turned back to cutting love-heart shapes out of rolled out pizza dough.

It’s been a hectic five years. I know this because of the perpetual tiredness that’s crept into my life, and the plethora of grey hairs that now adorn my head – particularly around the fringes. It must have been hectic, because you know what… looking back it’s all a blur. I can’t really remember much about it at all. That’s no surprise, I suppose, when you consider the inevitable result of adding a precocious lunatic with boundless energy into the empathic but often volatile dynamic you get between twins. Let’s just say it hasn’t been dull!

We’ve survived her first five years, and are looking forward to the ups and inevitable downs of the next five. Parenthood is a voyage into the unknown… every child and every day brings something new, challenging, sometimes traumatic and occasionally even exciting.

Let the adventure continue!