The Adventurer

Everyone always says you can tell the personality differences between your children pretty much from Day One. Not me. I have three possible explanations for this:

1. My children have fairly similar personalities.

2. I am unobservant.

3. The parents who see their children’s different personalities from birth are delusional.

No matter the reason, I have not seen many differences until recently. Yes, Addra drools far more than Coriel ever did. And she also has a giant tongue (Coriel is a bit tongue-tied, so she can’t stick her tongue out as far as Addra can). But these are minor differences. Generally they are both cheerful, sweet, badly sleeping, laughing, smiling, gorgeous girls.

And then came crawling. The Addra-pie is quite the crawler. She is an explorer. Coriel was more of an observer. She liked to be where I was and watch me. Not always so with Addra. One day the three of us were on the floor in the living room, playing. Suddenly Addra crawled away. She went down the hallway, looked around for a bit, and came back. I was absolutely floored (handy, I guess, that I was already sitting on the carpet). Never, never, never do I remember Coriel doing that. But Addra does it on a fairly regular basis. She just likes to check things out.

This means, tragically, that I’m going to have to babyproof far better than I have thus far, since she won’t always be near me to check up on.

Addra has also clearly become disenchanted with crawling. “Bored now,” she says. She is determined to be up and walking. Just as soon as she can get her muscles and balance working right. Darned muscles. 

So now I can wear my badge of motherhood proudly and say, “Of course I can tell the differences between my children’s personalities. Can’t you?”