Let me preface this by presenting Pitter’s Top Three Moments of the week, thus far:

1. I played a Pete Yorn song on the computer while making dinner on Monday. Pitter brought his step stool over to the counter to watch the YouTube video, and asked me to play it a second time. He said, “This is a GREAT song, Mommy” and then proceeded to dance around.

2. As he danced, he asked me to come over to him. “I have a secret, Mommy,” he said in his stage-whisper. “I love cupcakes!” he hissed in my ear. This is his one and ONLY secret, which he shares often.

3. Patter regularly pulls our hair. He thinks it’s funny. Lately, when he gets a handful of Pitter’s hair, Pitter calmly says, “No baby. Don’t do THAT,” and he gently pulls Patter’s hands away. This is amazing because five seconds before this scene, he’s jumping on top of the poor kid while I’m trying to change his diaper.

Okay, so now that I have done my duty to acknowledge the sweetness of my older child I can safely admit that I LOVE THE PANTS OFF OF MY BABY.

He is soooooooooooooooooo much easier to take care of than Pitter was at this age. And my reward for his good behavior is total and utter JOY.  And a large dose of guilt for realizing that although I loved Pitter back in the day, I was not particularly fond of him for a large portion of his babyhood.Because if you treat me well, I’ll love you more. It’s true.

To wit: I took Patter to Chicago last week and left Pitter in Sweet Cheeks’ charge. And it was delightful. We attended my cousin’s three hour college graduation in an old stuffy theater and Patter happily hung out in the carrier or scooted around the lobby floor. Afterwards, we had cocktails at the Palmer House Hotel and after that we went to a drawn-out fancy dinner. Patter smiled, gnawed on a hunk of bread for an hour, and  then nursed to sleep under the cover while I ate dinner and had desert. Later in the weekend, I was able to go to the Institute of Art and have a nice lunch with my family while Patter pretty much beamed and watched the world around him. His disposition is so chill. He’s the kind of baby unsuspecting people see and think to themselves, “Well that doesn’t look so hard!”

When Patter was a wee youngster, I  saw amenable babies like this and wondered, are they stupid? Are they drugged? Why won’t my baby sit.still. for more than 10 minutes at a time? These people are living a completely different reality. Why oh why can’t I????

News alert: children have different personalities and dispositions. And birth order probably plays a role in this.

While we like to think Pitter’s intelligence is part of the reason he’s constantly interested in things and won’t sit still, it’s also the case that he is a highly energized, high-maintenance child. Possibly the kind of child who will court ADD medications later on (I will do everything I can to avoid this). He’s the kind of child who acts calm and sits still and doesn’t literally jump off the chairs and do laps around the dinner table only when he’s sick. But he’s also the kind of child who is learning how to read before the age of 3 and who is precocious and looks like and speaks like a 4 year old.

And I love him. But I’m (mostly) not ashamed to say that it’s easier to love Patter right now.