One down, many to go

Aidan reached an exciting milestone today—the first anniversary of his birth. Yep, an entire year of craziness has passed since he was born. With the relocation and house hunt and colic and business trips and living in a temporary place, it's a wonder that any of us remains to tell the story. In fact, I've been in Monterey on business since Wednesday, but arranged to leave early from the CollabNet 2006 Engineering Offsite so that I could get back in time to say "Happy Birthday" in person to my boy. We're thrilled to have reached this milestone, and thank God for our wonderful second child.

It's really interesting to contrast who Aidan is at age one versus who Gavin was at that age (and to some degree, remains). The two are just completely different souls. Gavin was making strong, focused attempts at a handful of real words; Aidan is much more vocal, babbling incessantly with mostly nonsense sounds. Gavin was content to sit and play alone with one thing for long periods of time; Aidan is always moving, always redirecting his focus. He doesn't hold things but long enough to wind up and pitch them across the room. Cars, trains, and anything spherical—that's where Aidan's attention is.

Nothing drove these differences home to Amy and I more than our recent attempt at buying birthday gifts for Aidan. We admitted from the start that non-first children are disadvantaged because parents don't want to buy perfectly good toys that the child might like if the child's older siblings already have those toys. They are further disadvantaged when those older siblings aren't keen on sharing those toys! But the work we put into this shopping trip was much less an artifact of the available options being superficially minimized than it was the result of our two boys just being so different. But different is good; different is cool. Is it more challenging to us as parents? Sure. But I think in the end it's more rewarding, too.