We have a bully and a drama queen in our house. The bully is our older child, my son, and the drama queen is my daughter, who is eleven months younger. I am aware that children are ego-centric and learning how to behave with kindness and consideration of others is something we are taught, not born with. So what is a typical day like in our house of late?
Usually there are tears. Those tears come from the drama queen because as the younger sibling to a larger, more aggressive brother, she gets bowled over, taken advantage of and generally loses out on things unless we step in, intervene and enforce equality. But her brother isn't all bad. He will come over and hug her if she's truly upset. That is unless he caused it, and then he acts very busy and doesn't seem to notice she's even in the room.
But she's not completely innocent either. She will cry at the slightest insult, including things she does to herself. She seems to have an "adult proximity alert" and has been know to work her tears to their maximum advantage when adults are in range. We have upped our, "let's see how bad it really is" tolerance so that we don't over react or over-respond to her cries of "that's not fair!" or "I think that might have hurt!"
Their behaviors are markedly different when we're not around though. I have noticed this from my bed, early in the morning when two small children should be sleeping, but are, in fact, playing with toys in their play room at 6:02AM.
Our architect said he didn't like to put a bedroom over the master because you can potentially hear what happens above you. We didn't mind that so much and of late, it's been working to our advantage. We have a baby monitor, but beyond that, if they knock over a chair or fall while trying to climb something we didn't know they'd learned how to climb, we hear the thunk. We can also hear them flushing and re-flushing the toilet. This is helpful information to have so we know if we should go check to see which child decided to play in the potty or take action if the screaming is serious and there may be an injury.
But this is the interesting thing, when they're in their bedroom playing together with no adult supervision around, they get along well. There are some cries here and there, but in general, there is a relatively high level of harmony. They mess up the play room together. They borrow each others pacifiers, they get into bed together and jump up and down with glee and they seem to be friends.
So I'm always happy when I go up to see them in the mornings, although that joy can be tempered with the discovery that my son has removed his soiled diaper and has been sitting in various locations on the carpet before I arrived.
The Big Boy Update: A whole new kind of track pants. We've always liked getting him comfortable "track pants" or athletic-type pants, ideally with a nice single or double stripe down the side. Yesterday he discovered an entirely new kind of track pants. He removed the rubber tracks from his excavator and put them around his waist. He ran over to us and exclaimed he had new pants. It put a whole new twist on the meaning of "track pants."
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Doc Brown and the Banana Imperative. After baths we dry her hair. When it's first dried it's straight and crazy in all directions. It's just the right length and color to remind us of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. On the food front, she is banana obsessed. She says, "banana" all the time and if you're reading her a story or looking at something with pictures, she sees bananas in everything: a grasshopper's leg, the petal on a daisy and even a brown potato.
Someone Once Said: The customs of a race are implicit in its speech.
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