We were doing pretty well so far with our marriage goals and ideas, but there was one item we couldn’t possibly accomplish on our own—and we were determined to do something about it.
After all, how were we supposed to record our kids’ voices every year if we didn’t have kids?
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Fun, Whimsical, and Creative Parenting
Between the artwork plastering the walls, and the magnet that read “Our house is clean enough to be healthy and messy enough to be happy,” there was an element of contentedness in your household that made it happy and secure.
—Nadia Razaq Sutton, a former babysitter
Raising a family with Amy was the greatest adventure of my life. Boy, is that a huge understatement.
I’ve never had any complaints about my childhood, but I suppose on paper it might qualify as a bit dysfunctional—my parents divorced when I was two. My mother exhibited masterful parenting skills while raising my sister and me as a single parent. During this time, my dad, too, was single and had lots of girlfriends. It was either because of that, or in spite of it, that by the time I was grown-up (relatively speaking) and married to Amy, family had become incredibly important to me. In fact, one of the thousands of reasons Amy’s dad became one of my heroes is that he was the patriarch of his family, which eventually grew to twenty-three of us; and he never, ever passed up an opportunity, in conversations or behavior in general, to make it clear that family always came first for him and my mother-in-law.
So when, on our second wedding anniversary, we brought home our firstborn son, I was the happiest man on earth.
Justin was a chubby, blue-eyed beauty who entered the world with the personality he still maintains today. We were in awe of him, and not long after he was born, rather than be held down by his arrival, we simply made him our companion everywhere we went. We took him to restaurants, plopping him down in his car seat on a chair next to us and praying that he’d stay asleep while we ate. We took him on countless trips to spend time with the family, so he’d know from the time he was a baby that there was this whole group of people named Krouse and Rosenthal he was connected to, people who adored him and would always take care of him. They all marveled at this fascinating new little person, an extension of us and all of them; and without even trying he’d instantly transform them from perfectly articulate adults to a bunch of softies whose conversation was limited to gushing and baby noises.
Justin is brilliant. He always has been. From the moment he began to formulate and articulate thoughts, he blew us away with some of his perfunctory pronouncements, many of which Amy documented.
Justin, age eight: “When I graduate college, I’m getting in my car and going straight to see all the R-rated movies.” And when Amy said to him, “You were my little baby, and now look at you. How did you get so big?” he replied, without missing a beat, “Mom, it’s called life.”
Sometimes he showed a poignancy and a depth way beyond his years. Justin, age nine: “Mom, if you were God, and someone killed someone, but spent the rest of their life rescuing people, taking in stray animals, picking up litter, and doing mitzvahs, would you put them in heaven or hell?”
I mean, seriously, with a mind like that, is it any wonder he was extremely comfortable in the company of adults from the moment he was born?
Less than two years later, our son Miles arrived. Sweet and thoughtful, he was a natural addition to the growing Rosenthal clan. Justin was instantly fascinated with his little brother, and in no time at all, the two of them became inseparable. They were more like big cat cubs, and they literally would have preferred to be. They were rough and funny and loud, with a few inevitable injuries here and there, but from the very beginning they were so close that this union of “the boys,” as they became known, was solidified.
Miles has always been a combination of jock and philosopher. He stormed out of the womb a lithe, athletic boy, constantly running, jumping, and climbing the walls. He spent much of his childhood as Spider-Man, clinging to the highest point of every doorframe in the house. At the same time, he was a deep thinker who later became an avid reader. He was nine years old when he said, “I’m always thinking about something. And if I’m not thinking, then I’m writing words in my mind in cursive. Like I just wrote the word ‘door.’”
He was also a talker, with a wild imagination. Want to hear what he dreamed last night? Get yourself some coffee and strap in—this is going to take a while. Miles was as endlessly entertaining as his brother, and Amy and I loved nothing more in this world than the daily wonder of getting to know our two precious sons.
When Amy got pregnant with our third child, we knew it would be another boy. I mean, we obviously made boys, so what else could it possibly be? The answer, of course, to our surprise and joy: a gorgeous blue-eyed baby girl, who emerged from the womb with a full head of dark hair. For reasons you already know from reading about the night I proposed to Amy, we named her Paris.
Paris had an immediate, profound connection to her mom, almost as if they’d known each other in a past life and were just thrilled to be reunited in this one. She was still very little when she told Amy one day, “I always get confused in the morning because you’re always in my dreams, so I think you already know them.”
As a tiny person, she was empathetic, which is a quality that has never left her. She was four years old when the horrifying tragedy of September 11, 2001, stunned us all. Paris took it upon herself to color American flags to sell so that she could donate the money to the victims’ families. She was born with a soul-deep sense of family that’s still reflected in the life she lives today, and she inherited her mother’s uncanny flair for translating a list-making compulsion into a solid career as an author. (Her first lists, from the moment she was able to write, were simply the names of all our family members, including a whole lot of cousins, to whom our three kids have always been close.)
Of course, with three kids you would think that the entry from our marriage goals list that read Record our kids’ voices every year would have been no sweat. Full disclosure: we failed miserably. I did manage to capture Justin’s tiny voice as he navigated a golf cart on one of our family vacations. I recorded Miles, age four, reciting a story he’d somehow memorized from the tapes we played on trips in our minivan. And seven-year-old Paris was preserved by Amy in a home movie, giggling and being super silly after drawing eyes on her chin so that she still had a right-side-up face when she was upside down. But “every year” slipped through the cracks. I wish it hadn’t.
There were other failures on that list as well. When it came to Annual Portraits—“unadorned face” . . . what a fabulous idea. You should do it! (Never happened.) In our defense, we did take “couch pictures” almost every year, kind of a spontaneous, come-as-you-are impulse. We’d plop down on the family room couch and take a picture in whatever we were wearing, funky hair and all, from the time the kids were tiny blobs until they’d sprouted up to be quite a bit taller than their mommy. Not exactly the annual portraits we might have had in mind on our honeymoon when we made the original list of goals, but definitely the style of the family we’d become.
I’m proud to say, though, that there were several other entries on that list at which we absolutely excelled, which became both more challenging and more important after kids.