musings on temperment, birth order, and such

as i browsed back through portraits of baby bear, and i noticed a thread that runs through them for several months. i think i first noticed it at her 3 month portrait session. no matter how hard we tried, there were times she was just not going to smile. not on our terms, anyway. one of the best smiles captured on her face that weekend was in the carsear, while the posed portraits looked like sheer torture in some snapshots (i'm so glad s & g captured the reality). 9 months later, she is still very much the same. she is not a "ham". her younger cousin, on the other hand, is the opposite. while both girls' smiles will melt your heart, baby bear's cousin seems to turn "on" in front of the camera. my little girl... studies it. the vibrant, gleeful grins of her cousin don't even phase her. she studies the camera, the flash, the photographer. and smiles if she wants to. sometimes it's a mona lisa smile, one in which her eyes speak what the shape of her mouth will not.

ironically, my baby bear seems to be the more physically aggressive of the two girls, who are just 6 1/2 weeks apart. she is the first one to crawl over and plant several kisses on her cousin's bewildered face. sometimes she adds the "mwah!" sound effect as she kisses. she wants to touch her cousin's eyes, ears, mouth.. you name it. she laughs hysterically and dances to larry the cucumber. the same toy terrifies her barely-younger cousin, who always seems to need to acclimate to her cousin's "love language". Youngest niece is a chatterbox and dancer, she bops to any and every song, including ones she seems to be making up. (Her Mommy chattered 100 words a second growing up.) Baby bear has her babbling noises, but seems to only say words she is confident she can say well... mama, dada, cat, "du"(duck). She's not the incessant "reader" or chatterbox, rather she communicates in non-verbal ways (unless she has woken up and is awaiting to be rescued from her cage). I hate to admit it, but I was the one who held my word in and exhibited violent tendencies as a child. (Like biting my baby sister after she bit me. I was 6.) Does this mean Baby Bear will hold it all in til she explodes? Thankfully, she's 13 months old and we don't have to deal with that yet. both of these girls are (currently) only children and firstborn, yet their temperment is uniquely their own....

then, another twist. my mom commented that my oldest niece, "Monarch", reminded her so much of my older brother when he was her age. Extremely intelligent and intense, focusing only on things that they find challenging. They are not related, as this niece is hubby's brother's daughter. Both are firstborn. One is 30 something, one is in kindergarten. How she picked up on this in just a couple of hours with Monarch at baby-bear's party, and perhaps in the time at Caslon & Han Solo's wedding reception, is beyond me. I do tend to take her observations with a grain of salt sometimes. But when she told me she saw similarities, for some reason it did not surprise me in the least. Eaglet (big brother) was writing programs for or Texas Instruments computer when he was just a young lad... possibly even as young as 5 or 6 (with Dad's help), definitely by 9 or 10.

It will be fun to see which personality traits that we see in our babies are still apparent in 5 years, in different ways. Sometimes not so much fun, I suppose, but always interesting.