My Kids’ Personalities
After I read Amy’s post about different personality types among siblings, I started thinking about the personalities my two kiddos have. My daughter and son have their similarities but they also have big differences too. While my daughter will play dress up my son can’t stand the stuff. My son is happy to wrestle and scream all day long, but my daughter can only take that for so long before she wants to do something else. In other words, they each have their own preferences and that’s fine with me because it keeps things interesting around the house.
Here is the thing about baby personalities that you may not realize: Your baby may wind up with a personality that clashes with your own. I don’t mean this in a bad way, as though the personalities clashing is a sure-fire way to destroy the baby-parent bond. What I mean is that you should brace yourself to one day look at your child and think to yourself, “How in the world did you form this personality?”
Here is an example. I like to have quiet alone time once in a while and love to have an afternoon nap every day. Of course, this is in an ideal world and the vast majority of the time I don’t get quiet time or a nap. Why? My daughter will not nap and can go go go without stopping all day long. She’s happy as can be as long as she has something to do, and there is hardly ever a time when she decides to go off and do something on her own without first being prompted to do so by her exhausted parents.
The other day I was particularly exhausted. My son had gone down for his nap and I was hoping to take a little rest. My daughter comes up to me.
Her: “Mommy, let’s pretend I’m a princess and you’re the queen and we’re going to the ball.”
Me: “Sweetie, Mommy needs to take a rest. It’s been a long day.”
Her: “But Mommy, play pretend with me. Hey, can we make some Jell-O? I really want to make some Jello-O.”
It was then that I looked at her and thought to myself, “Have I taught you nothing about how to relax?”
The fact is that she just doesn’t need little bits of rest throughout the day. She doesn’t need quiet time like the rest of us. She’s a rarity among humans: She keeps going until bedtime, and doesn’t pause until then…and she’s happy to do so.
I’m happy that she has her very own personality, but it still surprises me that in a house full of people who like to relax she would rather go go go.
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