Kidular Development

Watching my kids grow up is an exercise in confounded expectations. Not that, for example, I expected child-rearing to be some kind of smooth and straight road–I was the oldest of five, after all. I know how crazy stuff can get. I was some of that crazy stuff.

But my oldest started out right away throwing a monkeywrench into the works, by not having all his alloted parts. Evidently he wasn’t listening when they said “take two kidneys from the bin,” or something. And I know we’re lucky and/or blessed to have that be the greatest of his physical handicaps. Many people have it a lot worse.

Still, they really do give you a manual when the kid is born (or, rather, well-meaning family or friends give you eight billion books, from the May Clinic’s mammoth volume, to the ever-popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting which also covers the first year of the kid’s life. The funny thing about the manuals is most of them say the same thing: “This is the range in which you can expect this kind of thing but, uh, your mileage may vary. Wildly.”

Tony’s cousin, who is ten months younger, seems to be forming coherent words a little earlier than my man did, but then, he’s also been in daycare for much longer, which I think gives him a conversational edge. More kids around that are his age and such.

Which brings me to a sort of digression. Not to bag on stay-at-home moms or anything, because I know in many cases they’re doing it because they want to be that involved with their kids day-in and day-out, but if we kept ours here at home, I don’t think they’d get much exposure to other kids at all until kindergarten. I mean, part of that is that so many kids are in daycare–we have one woman who does home daycare on our block, but I gather that’s an aberration rather than the norm. There aren’t lots of kids around a neighborhood during the day, even in a kid-heavy neighborhood like ours, so if you want them to make friends you have to either arrange stuff with other stay-at-home parents, or … have a ton of kids, I suppose.

Or run your own home daycare, I suppose.

Anyway, what’s funny is that in SOOO many ways my kids could not be more different, developmentally. I think when Tony was Hannah’s age, he was more comfortable being on his belly, for instance, but Hannah hates it, which makes it a mystery as to why she even learned to roll over from her back to her belly in the first place. But right after that, not surprisingly, she learned to roll from belly to back, which I gather is the reverse of how it’s supposed to go.

Which is not to say that either of them are developing in a bad way, or “wrong” which is the beauty of the system, and makes me wonder why we refer to those books in the first place. But, I guess a rough guide is better than none at all.

On a related note, my son woke me up the other day. Not unique, except that he did so physically, and not at his mother’s prompting. In fact, Tarri wasn’t home at all. These days Tony is sleeping in a bed he can climb out of, and while he usually waits for us to come tell him he can get out of bed, Saturday morning he didn’t. I woke up with a toddler in my face. He can’t really get anywhere other than our bedroom as we keep a gate up across our common hallway at night. Nice to know, though, that he’s figured out coming to get us. Well, me, anyway.

Crossposted with klech.net