Hug Twice

It is continually amazing to me how two kids who both have the same parents can be so different from one another. But in so many ways, CJ and Alexa are like night and day. Well, in every way except that they both preferred night over day…

CJ has always been my adventurer. He has never met a challenge he hasn’t wanted to tackle. He may be shy around new people, but new “things” he has no problem with. He was the one at gymnastics class climbing over the obstacle course and jumping in the foam pit before the teacher had even finished explaining what they were supposed to do. He’s the child who tried to, at 11 months, climb the curved ladder up the playground equipment and when he was too short to reach the next bar, wiggled himself up one of the edge supports (with anxious mommy standing right next to him with a hand he didn’t need under him at all times). He literally walked as soon as he could take a step, ran as soon as he could walk, and is a “do now, think later” type of child. He’ll build a tower of blocks as high as it will go until it falls down with no thought about how to make it stable enough to last, because he’ll just start building it again as soon as it falls.

Alexa on the other hand, she is much more reserved. Not that she lacks curiosity or drive, but she goes about it in a whole different manner. She thinks, and even in her 12 month old face, you can see her thinking and considering options before she crafts a plan of attack. When she builds a tower, she looks at the two pieces and figures out how to fit them together. Each piece builds upon the last. She still is not walking, because she doesn’t feel confident in letting go of the edge. You can see her consider it, and then she’ll drop back to crawling or go another direction instead of walking away from what she’s holding on to. I’m convinced that this point she won’t actually walk on her own until she does it accidentally. She’s always been a thinker - she spent much of her first year watching the world from the safety of mommy or daddy’s arms and content to see what what going on without getting involved in it.

That’s not the only way they differ. CJ was the child who needed no sleep. Or at least, it seemed that way to us. He woke up every few hours like clockwork, every night, for literally two years straight. Once in a while he would sleep through for a few nights, just enough for me to think that he was finally sleeping through the night, then he wouldn’t again. Two years is a long time. Amazingly enough, he is now at three a great sleeper who puts himself to sleep and stays asleep all night on his own. But I digress.

Alexa may love the nightlife as much as her brother did (they were both night owls and she still is) but when she goes to sleep, it is for the long haul. She strung longer stretches of sleep together at 1 month old than her brother did at 1 year old. And she’s always been that way. We didn’t do anything different with her than we did with CJ, and she naturally slept completely differently. She’s not always the perfect sleeper and she does naturally want to be awake much later than either her daddy or I prefer, but she generally does a lot better overnight than her brother did anywhere near her age.

Two kids with the same parents… two totally different personalities and really, habits in general. I wonder a lot about nature vs nurture and what effect our parenting really has on them. I guess we’ll see how similar yet different they become as they grow older.

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