Varying age gaps between siblings- your experiences?

[AnyDream]

The gap between my two is 9 and a half years. They adore each other.

[meow]

The gap between my two is 9 and a half years. They adore each other.

See, this is not my concern. If I only had my younger sister I would adore her as much as I do now. I'm more concerned about when there are three children and two of them are closer in age.

[Freya]

Ive always said the three kid dynamic is a bit tricky.

My boys can get along fine as a group of three most of the time. They do have times where two will pair off but because mine are so close in age the pairings change alot. It used to be a pairing of Ds2 and Ds3 because they were at home together while Ds1 started school but now it seems to be Ds1 and Ds2 now they're at school together. Ds1 and Ds3 seem to clash the most but Ds3 is at a difficult stage and annoying all of us lol

Its an amazing magic trick that they can all be fighting tooth and nail in the 3-kid grouping but as soon as you take ONE kid out, doesnt matter which one - it settles down! Its like that third kid changes the dynamic enough to make it chaos, but its not particular to a particular kid its just any third kid - even when I have two of mine and a friend's kid

[Freya]

double post again.

[Arimeh]

To be honest, thats another reason why we weren't having another after DD3 - we had such small gaps (4 kids in 4 years, 2 months) so I didn't want to have a huge gap - and by the time she was 1, I didn't want to go back to the newborn stage, I was enjoying my last baby growing up and moving past that.

I worry that this next one will be left out - DS is sometimes left out, not because of age, but because of gender. He doesn't want to play dolls and thats all the 3 girls are interested in. It took a while for DD3 to play well with the other older girls, but now she is 2, she plays pretty well with them (when they aren't shutting her out of the room because she can't open the doors on her own just yet).

I'm hoping that when DD1 goes to school next year, she will start bonding with DS a little more, because he is always feeling left out - and we feel bad for him.