It's in the Blood

In a week's time, my youngest will be turning two fingers, a fact she's proud to demonstrate with minimal prompting ("How old are you?" "Doo!") No parent is ever supposed to pick favorites (or at least not own up to doing so) but I'm fortunate that mine all are so different that it's easy to pick favorite aspects of each.

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The oldest one is the only boy, my Middle Schooler, and The Jock. He's everything I wasn't in school: slim, athletic, sun-loving, with a pierced ear and a desire to run as far and as fast as he can, all day if given the chance. He is my nature-versus-nurture case study. He's bright, but unlike me, he's not really high on the organization scale. (Though I do remember letting a 6th grade research paper lapse until the very last, possible moment, and then losing three days typing it up -- yes, typing, with footnotes -- through bitter tears.)

The middle child is the Bookworm. She's been in love with books from the day she could toddle around with an armload of them, looking for the first available lap. Now that she can actually read, she's been known to disappear into her room for hours, surrounded by a word-fort of all the books she's pulled from her floor to ceiling shelves. This one sunburns easily, loves to draw and paint, is food-sensitive, has a touch of SPD. In unkinder days she might have been called a "spaz." I can relate to this one.

And now the youngest, on the cusp of turning two. We've gotten a pretty good picture of her personality. Active like her brother, book-loving like her sister, and the Comedian of the family, some of that probably coming from being the youngest of three, and the child voted Most Likely To Grow Up At Soccer Games and Track Meets. She's busy enough to ensure that three is enough. Beyond that, we don't have a good sense of who she's going to be except for two things.

1. She loves shoes, and clucks with delight at the opportunity to put them on, take them off, or throw them at the dog.
2. She's obsessed with pens, pencils, crayons and paper.

I've posted this picture a few times, because I think it's really funny: she "helped" out with my NaNo 2008 novel by using the typewriter whenever I wasn't around, and by scattering my index cards to the four corners of the family room (actually, that last part was not so funny.) I don't know what's going to happen this year, but I do know that twice in the last two weeks, she's taken a #2 pencil to the laptop screen and scrawled all over it, with great delight.

Love of office supplies? Fascination with typewriters? Desire to deface the computer? It's in the blood.