So, here's the thing. I have actually been looking for and not finding an opportunity for a time-skip for quite a while now. I am now going through edits and re-writes in which I'm now planning on having the kids stay in the village for quite a bit longer and get a lot older before the events at the end. (a kid knifing an adult hunter will be a bit less impressive than an infant knifing an adult hunter, but it will help me with a lot of the problems I'm having now.) The thing is, I REALLY wanted them to all be at least 5 before the next major development in the story. But, it's starting to look like things are developing in a way where that development could happen while they're still toddlers but, if that happened, then the action scenes I was planning will make absolutely no sense. They actually have to be older in order to have the motor skills for what I had planned. So, I am just not finding a point where a time-skip will make sense. So, I can do one of two things here. Either stick in a time skip where it DOESN'T make sense, or I can go ahead and ramble for a while in the story and not have it really reach the major developments in quite as fast of a pace as I had wanted. It will make things run smoother, but it would essentially mean there's a huge block of filler in the story.
So, most of the people who have gotten this far are going to be people who are into this story and enjoying it so far. Both options here before us will lower the quality of the story. The only thing that fixes this is what I'm currently doing in the re-writes which, due to that major change I'm planning on making, will no longer be compatible with integration into the current version. This means that this rough draft version is going to have a scar on it. It's just a matter of choosing how that scar is going to look. So, I'm a fan of polls. Which of these two bad options would all of you like to see? (Also, the chapter I am currently writing (which is 4 chapters ahead of this one) is a place where I have an opportunity to start moving this toward a rather choppy feeling time-skip if that option is selected. So, I will unfortunately have to delay the release of the next chapter until the poll results are in for this poll to actually mean anything.)