Expecting too much too soon?

When you have your first child, you always went them to be "advanced" for their age. You have great pride when you see your child sitting up before others his age, you beam when you get comments at how well they speak for thier age, ect. I have found that as a general rule, most parents seem to expect more out of their oldest child, seeing them as The Oldest and want them to behave that way. Ryan and I are guilty of that, we know it and try not to do it to poor Brendan, but it does happen. Then child #2 comes along and they advance quicker than their older sibling, as is expected. With Aaron, his speaking skills are exceptional for his age (you didn't think I could get thru a post without braggin about at least one of boys, did you??). I myself did not really realize this until being told by another Mom of a 3 year old and several other people. The downfall of being second born is that if you don't seem to reach milestones by the age that the older sibling did, it seems you are behind. Our perfect example of this is with Aaron and potty training. With Brendan, it was a very quick process--he picked up on it very quickly and never looked back. With Aaron, we started MUCH earlier than we did with Brendan, and were always frustated when he would backslide. Finally, now that he is just over 33 months old, only about 2.5 months away from turning 3 can we say that he is totally, 100% out of diapers--very rare nighttime accidents. All this time I have been bragging about Brendan and how he was trained by the time he was 2 1/2. Well guess what........I recently found the reciept for his Buzz toy that he picked out the day he first pooped on the potty, and you know how old he was?? 32 months old! That means that Aaron was trained almost the exact same age as Brendan! See what I mean about expecting too much too soon? So now I can say this about both my boys--they were potty trained before they were 3, which I am still told is great for boys. And now we will discuss the third child--we no longer want them to be advanced for thier age, but it seems that no matter what we do, we can't prevent that from happening. That third baby, we want to stay a baby for as long as we can. There is no pushing them to sit up, roll over, crawl. On the contrary, we don't even encourage any of that! At least in my case, I don't try to get Joshua to do anything. He will want to be like his big brothers soon enough, so he won't need any encouragement from my end. All I can do is love him up and enjoy him as an infant as long as he will let me.

There are 2 things that make me cry every time and both have to do with my boys. The first is the book, "Love You Forever".......have never gotten more than 3 pages in without choking up. I'll love you forever, I'll love you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be. And the other is a song that I swear was written for me and my boys (as I am sure that every mother feels the same way when she hears it). The song was one that I would play over and over and over when I would walk the floors late at night with Brendan when he was a fussy "little man" and now when "Supermans (Aaron) in pajamas on the couch". I can't help but listen to the words now and look at all my boys and get teary-eyed. Take a listen................