Differences

So this weekend it became more clear to me how a second child may be treated differently than the first child.

Emily has been a bear. Not the cute cuddly bear that normally comes to mind, that hops around playing and frolicking with his brothers and sisters. No, this is the bear that you only see on National Geographic at 1am, titled "When Cute Bears Go Nuts 3", mauling small woodland creatures, trees, cameramen, narrators, etc. Jenn can attest to this, probably more than I can. To Emily's defense, she is teething. She teethes a lot.

Anyway, based on this behavior, this weekend we came to the conclusion that if Emily is not doing anything harmful or dangerous (lighting indoor objects on fire, mauling small woodland creatures, etc.), then we leave well enough alone. She was walking that fine and quite invisible line between happy and crying uncontrollably.

So this brings me to Saturday lunch-time, when Jenn made yummy Hebrew National hotdogs, and sliced strawberries. Emily's plate had bite-sized hotdog slices, strawberries, and ketchup, separated nicely into three distinct sections, although without any formal barricades enforcing segregation.

Emily ate her hotdogs, and then started eating her strawberries. Through inevitable movements of the plate during lunch, some of the strawberry pieces moved dangerously close to the pile of ketchup. Emily noticed this, and with a keen sense of wonder, decided to dip her strawberries in her ketchup. I quickly said "Emily.....no, don't do that. Yucky." She shook her head "no", and smiled cutely, in the same way a hungry bear might say "no, I promise not to eat you" to a big fat pig. She then proceeded to use her wonder-twin powers to magically morph her fingers into a mixer, and completely slather all the strawberries in all the ketchup. And with a couple fists full of this mess, she ate her ketchup-coated strawberries, every last one.

Now, the difference between first child and second child. If this was Caleb, I would have surely stopped him from making this horrible mistake in judgement, saving his tongue from such a brew of disgustingness. But this was chid #2, and my reaction, though still disgusted by her choice in flavor, was to sit back and say with a completely straight face, "Go for it."

This is where it starts. If the second child wants to eat ketchup and strawberries, let it be. But I can unequivocally say, if Caleb did the same thing this past Saturday, he'd be in timeout...... after a good hand-washing, of course.