And We Thought We Knew Parenting

It’s time to talk about how boys are different from girls.
Take glaring. Carter practices glaring frequently. In fact, narrowing his eyes in mock seriousness is one of his favorite jokes. Girls are different. Cora, for example, was born a master, and, if you know what’s good for you, you won’t laugh.
When learning to talk, my girls loved to repeat me and loved to be correct (except for Mia, who refused to speak). Me: (pointing) Nose! Cora and Lina: (pointing) Nose! Carter, though, doesn’t have a strong need for the brownie points of being “right.” Me: (pointing) Nose! Carter: (glancing to the side, thinking. Finally grabbing my hair and pulling as hard as he can) ‘ose!
At eighteen months, Lina had probably 200 words. Cora, maybe 150 and so eager to talk over her talking-over older sister that she’d spit words out with no thought to pronunciation or grammar, fighting to beat Lina to the punch (“Bum sticka out Mommy!”). Mia said only, “dijsh.” Carter had around four last week but already learned fix or six more since I started typing this blog (his words, in roughly the order they came: here you go, mama, dada, hi, nose, eye, ear, cheese, shoe)
Carter says words but at first it was rarely part of conversation. He says “here it is,” to himself but when you make it a game, he stops and gets up. He runs across the room and then stares at you, rocking back and forth (it’s best if you are seated on the ground for this game.) He say, “uh, uh, uh!” and runs at you, laughing. Sometimes he falls before arriving, it’s so funny. Or he’ll stop halfway and glare at you, trying adorably not to laugh. He tackles. He bonks heads. He collapses in joy if you capture him before he’s able to leave you for another round. He slips and nearly does the splits and then glances over at you, to verify you are watching this crazy move he just pulled. It’s so amazing. It’s never been done before, ever. It needs to be explored for ten minutes.
Unless the fall hurt him and then he cries in pathetic misery.
My older girls tend to cry in anger. Every hurt makes them angry. Especially Lina. Lina thinks the whole world should stop and apologize to her and make sure she’s okay after she stubs her own toe. Cora cries and is angry but actually prefers to suffer alone. She gets embarrassed that people have seen her crying. Mia, my tough one, doesn’t seem to be hurt by minor falls and has no fake or angry cries. One time, she fell and screamed and I thought, “Here it comes.” Sure enough, that was when she knocked her front teeth in at the playground. To make up for not crying at falls, she screams whenever someone offends her. This happened 147 times a day.
Mia doesn’t just scream when she’s offended, she screams all the time. Mia: DADDY! ARE WE READY FOR GO? DADDY! DADDY! Mike: Yes, we’re leaving. Stop shouting. Mia: (not having heard a thing because she never stopped screaming) DADDY! ARE WE READY FOR GO? DADDY! DADDY! I literally shout in her face: STOP-SHOUTING-WE-ARE -ANSWERING-YOUR-QUESTION-STOP IT-STOP-IT-AND-LISTEN! I’m not saying this is wise, I’m just saying it comes out of my mouth a lot. If I had to estimate the number of words we all speak in a day, I’d say it went like this—
Me: 7,000; Mike: 3,000; Cora: 3,000; Carter: 8 (up from 2 just a week ago); Mia: 14,000; Lina 14,000,000
So clearly, Mia doesn’t win yet but she’s only three, so there’s still a chance.
Carter is sensitive to lots of things, not just spills and falls. I’ve heard girls are more sensitive. Tell this to Carter whose lips quiver in an upside down smile if anyone sings “As I Have Loved You,” in either English or Spanish. He thinks you’re putting him to bed. If, when he’s tired, you shake your finger and say, “No,” when he turns the stair lights on and off twenty times from the first step, he’ll slowly collapse in forlorn misery, sure he’s been rejected forever.
If he’s in a good mood and you try to stop him from running away into a crowd of museum-goers, he will designate your command as a “joke,” laugh at you, and run faster. He tells himself lots of things are “jokes.” Mommy shrieking when he pulls her hair. Mommy shouting, “Ouch! Carter, stop!” when he kicks her pregnant belly during diaper changes. These are all very funny. Daddy is not so funny. Carter cried and wouldn’t let Mike hold him for several minutes when Mike yelled, “No!” after Carter sliced Mike’s lip by pinching it with his fingernails.
The girls are split on cleanliness and the jury’s still out on the boy. Cora is our neat-freak. Sometimes when she’s bored, she cleans the entire loft or begs for me to let her scrub toilets. She does dishes and washes sinks. She sweeps with 80% efficiency and wipes up the table with 50%. Her most frequent expression is, “What can I do? There’s nothing to do!” I’m going to be so angry when kindergarten steals my little maid. I’m totally kidding. I can’t wait for her to have more to do. Lina and Mia are more adept at creating entertainment than Cora is. Cora loves to follow other’s leads but we are still working on teaching her activity-initiative.
Lina is also getting really good at chores but she refuses to wash her clothes. Let me rephrase. I, her mother, do all of the laundry in the house but she clings to shirts-pants combos, keeping them out of the hamper, sure that she can wear them just one more day. She takes them off for dance and then puts them back on despite chocolate ice cream stains and peanut-butter-and-honey smudges. She will style her hair in front of the mirror for ten minutes. She’s getting really good at putting in clips and hair ties, and really opinionated and specific with her advice to me about how hair styles ought to look. But she will not notice the spaghetti sauce on her nose. She absent-mindedly wipes breakfast eggs onto any fabric handy—her jeans, the seat of the chair, etc.
Mia’s idea of chores is to make a mess with toys and keep me from my own chores begging for attention. When we’re all done and I tell Cora and Lina what a good gob they did, she demands approval by shouting, “MOMMY, WHAT I DO FOR CHORES?” I say, “You played with Carter, thank you.” She repeats, “MOMMY, WHAT I DO FOR CHORES?” because she never listens to answers. Then she runs off to stop Carter from removing the scarf she tied around his legs. One thing Mia hates, though, is to have water or food on her clothes or fingers. She changes her outfits at least daily because of spills. On laundry day, she has three times the amount of stuff to put away as Lina.
As for Carter, he’s like Mia and doesn’t like to have anything sticky on him. He comes to me when he needs his diaper changed. But he’s not shy around mud puddles and such, so we’ll see how difficult he makes my life once I let go of the death grip I maintain whenever we’re within thirty feet of roads and cars.
Carter is a serious runner. He plots. He feigns. He screams to get out of being held by either people or strollers. If I set him down in exhaustion, he grins. The joke is on! Then he runs. He is so angry when he’s captured. I don’t think any other thing makes his so angry. Except, 1) refusing to give him milk in a sippy cup, no matter the hour, or 2) refusing to allow him access to his blanket, no matter the hour.
Another thing. My girls will eat anything with sugar in it—petrified gummy bears found in the parking lot, toothpaste, fruit punch the color of toxic chemicals. My boy is like them, sometimes begging for sweets by refusing to eat, figuring that the right item (yogurt) will pop up someday. But the curious thing is that he rejects absolutely anything that could help the poor kid with his constipation. Raisins? Apples? Juice? All no’s. What kind of kid refuses to drink juice?
We’ve tried apple, plum, passion fruit, yummy strawberry juice mixes. He won’t drink them. But bananas, cheese, and whole wheat bread, sure he’ll eat those. No wonder he only poops every forty-eight hours, and only then under high duress, forced to deal with constipated bowl movements every half an hour for like three hours straight. Oh, but what about medicine! Of course, that will work. Everyone likes grape or cherry flavored medicine. Everyone but Carter. Not in chewable or liquid form. The only way he’ll take powdered form is in . . . milk, another, um, show-stopper. I feel so bad for him. Last time, I slipped the medicine into a smoothie of strawberries and peaches and that worked. Oh, life with an eighteen-month-old.
After typing this, it almost seems like each of my kids are unique and that girls and boys are no more different than girls and girls. That is wrong. Don’t let me or the crazy no-gender people fool you. Boys aren’t the same as girls! I haven’t talked about how Carter loves trucks, or how he makes every physical activity a competition, or how he mimics my lectures by producing loud growls that are part robot, part Ewok, and part that-crazy-guy-from-Police-Academy-III (do I really sound like that?), or how he impersonates fullbacks by adopting their three-point stance with his tiny, twenty-pound body while Mike watches TV, or how he runs around literally shaking with wild excitement once the ball is snapped to the quarterback . . . . We love them all the same but, I’m telling you, boys are different from girls!