Jumping in Leaves

I tackled one of the dreaded Brookside homeowner chores this afternoon:  raking.  The leaves are never ending here and our first round needed to be raked up.  As I raked my almost 5-year-old daughter was squealing with delight as she jumped in the leaf piles.  There isn't much better than hearing your child yell, "THIS IS SO FUN!" as they play. 

But I was filled with a little bit of guilt.  You see, it hadn't even occurred to me to rake up a pile of leaves for her to jump in before she spotted my pile and took over.  It's the curse of the second child.  When her brother was 4 I am sure I made a huge deal out of raking a pile of leaves and taking photo after photo of him jumping in, with little sister watching (still a little too young to fully participate).  But now that my son is almost too old to really want to jump in leaves all afternoon, I kind of forgot about it. 

I wonder how many things my daughter misses out on just because we've "moved past" them already.  I know we don't go to as many parks as we used to.  We don't go to as many shows aimed at the 4/5 year old crowd.  She gets dragged along to a lot of big-brother's activities (and she's SUCH a good sport about it). 

But in other ways she gets to do other "big girl" things that she may not have gotten to do at her age if she were the oldest.  She gets to stay up later than her big brother did when he was her age, we do more "big" things like all-day trips or amusement parks, and she seems to learn to do things like swimming earlier because I'm more likely to let her try things out. 

I don't know how it all evens out in the end, but I will say this....I need to remember to let my little girl jump in the leaves more often.