How could I smoothly change size that a node takes up inside a vbox container?

Godot 4.1

I have a series of richTextLabel nodes that appear inside a VBoxContainer, new ones appearing under existing ones.

I'd really like the new label to smoothly slide the existing ones up, so that you can continue reading, but I can't work out how. Because it's part of a vbox container, I can't use an animation to smoothly change the size of the node, and if I animate the scale of the richTextLabel the animation plays, but the space the node takes up within the Container is that of its maximum, not-animated size. The animation isn't respected by the parent.

Is there a way I can achieve this, or is there a different parent node than VBoxContainer that I could use to achieve this effect more neatly?

Note: I'm already animating in the words but this isn't as smooth as I like. If i use visible characters then after every line, all the text snaps up which is a lot of small movements all the time, and if I use visible ratio, I get closer to the effect I want where the text only moves up once when a new paragraph appears, but it's still a very sharp motion that I'd love to smooth.

Paragraphs in the scene (left) with the editor structure (right)