So, my older son and my daughter. They are doing very well, circumstances being what they are. First and foremost, to view things through the new baby lenses that are regularly affixed to my field of vision, they are both completely crazy about their infant brother. While my wife and I were at the hospital with the newborn and the kids were at home with their grandparents, they all worked together to make a welcome home banner for our return. The handwriting was clearly my son’s, no doubt with an adult assist in the spelling department. I imagine a lot of children would have been content to scrawl the simple message “Welcome Home Mommy, Daddy and Baby” but the little guy, while including that very sentiment as well, actually led off with a declarative statement that has yet to be proven false in the ensuing weeks: “We Love The Baby.” Oh, indeed they do. I will come down on the side of avowing it’s not possible to love the baby too much, but if it were possible, then the little guy and little girl would be guilty of it. They want to hold and touch the baby. All. The. Time. It really doesn’t matter if the baby is sleeping, or crying, or nursing, the siblings want to have him cradled on their laps, baby head on toddler/big kid shoulder, toddler/big kid hands laced in front of swollen baby stomach. If they can’t hold him, they want at the very least to play with his toes or put their cheeks against the soft skin of his back. And it’s heart-bursting, in the best way, of course it is, but it poses inconvenient logistical challenges. The little guy cannot quite grasp that when we say “don’t touch the baby’s head” we really mean it as a constant, no-exceptions prohibition. And the little girl is prone to tantrums if she isn’t given open access to her little brother (screams of “MY baby!” have been echoing off the walls of late). I reckon the baby’s perceptions of the outside world are still a touch too muted for him to freak out at all the attention, because if he were sensitive to it he would pretty much be in a non-stop panic.
Still, all in all, I would rather deal with an overabundance of affectionate curiosity toward the baby than with ambivalence or hostility. I would understand the latter, and we’d work through it, but I’m just as glad to not contend with it in the first place. There’s still plenty of hazards to navigate in terms of regression, more on the little guy’s part than the little girl’s (so far), but again that’s more or less the expected price of admission. I have to hand it to my wife, who has been remarkably on top of the situation via some skillful newborn ventriloquism. Whenever the little guy is hovering close to my wife’s knees as the baby is hanging out in her lap, my wife adopts a silly voice and speaks for the newborn, engaging his older brother in pseudo-conversation which the little guy enjoys tremendously. Invariably these dialogues center around (a) things the bigger brother knows, which he can teach the little brother; (b) things the bigger brother can do, which the little brother can’t (and can’t wait to be able to do someday); and (c) just generally how the bigger brother is the little’s hero. I don’t have a control to measure against, but I firmly believe this is all to the good of helping stave off massive baby panic in the little guy.
And just to expand the scope beyond All Things Neonatal, I will say that the funniest thing I’ve noticed about my four-and-a-half-year-old lately is the fact that he appears to have internalized one of the major thrusts of our co-parenting, specifically the notion that everything we force him to do, and everything we forbid him from doing, comes down to caring about his safety and well-being. I know this has made an impression on him because nowadays when he jumps off the arm of the couch and causes something on the adjacent table to crash to the floor, he immediately yells “I’m OK!!!” Because of course that would be the primary thing we would be concerned about. (He’s right, that’s the galling thing. Totally remorseless about breaking the rules, but also right about what really matters.)
The little girl, meanwhile, is a study in contradictions. Sometimes she is dainty, dare I say coquettish, taking nine bites to eat a single potato chip for instance. And sometimes she is a brute, with a hilariously growly way of shouting when she’s good and fired up. Not fired up with anger, just fired up with excitement. Like a Viking berserker, nothing personal, you understand. Then there’s the general contrariness, where she proves to simply be a fan of the mouthfeel (as my wife aptly put it) of the word “no”. I have amassed a few tidbits of advice for new parents from my own experiences in the past five years, and near the top of that list is this: do not ever get angry with a two-year-old for changing his/her mind on you. Consistency is not their strong suit, as they can barely remember what happened five seconds ago as it is. And, in the same vein, dealing with a two year old is the one cliche-busting circumstance in which it is not insane to attempt the same thing over and over again and expect different results. I know pretty well by now that if I suspect my daughter is thirsty and I offer her milk, and she says “No!” I can wait a couple of ticks and ask her again and the odds are in my favor that she will then say “Yes!” She just needed to get a little defiant willfulness out of her system, I suppose.
So I have not unexpectedly grown extra arms, nor have I figured out a way to magically add more hours to the day, but there is still something amazing about bringing a new baby into the world and into our family home. I am not any less enthralled and enchanted with my infant son for having been through two previous babyhoods, nor do I love my older son or my daughter any less for now having a third child to love alongside them. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really. Overwhelming, sometimes utterly draining, but ... someday I will have a fifteen-year-old, a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old and I will laugh myself silly at how I used to fret about meeting the needs of three wee ones who were all in bed by 8.
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