Dooce and the continuum concept.

I smiled at this. She and her husband have two girls, by the way.

We just read some great advice somewhere that said to treat every kid as if they are the sixth of eighteen children. You'll get to them sometime, but right now the fifteenth kid is burning down the kitchen, so whoever is fussing right now will have to suck it.

The context is "getting the baby to sleep through the night in a crib," which is something I've never actually done, being the co-sleeping type, but I still found it refreshing.  I have been heavily influenced by the "continuum concept"* in family life applications, but I eventually quit most of my subscriptions to continuum-type mailing lists in part because they lacked many participants who understood that applying it was going to look differently in families with more than one or two kids.  

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*Continuum concept in a nutshell:  "in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings — especially babies — require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution."   Feel free to substitute "the kind of experience that our species was designed for" if you prefer, it still works.   Anyway, I figure that our species should be WELL adapted to children having several siblings, and therefore occasionally having to wait for something.