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Developing a Personality


 And suddenly, baby is 6 months! Every day I am with my students who are 6 years old, and I thought about how 6 is just twelve of these half  years. I guess there will not be a point when it becomes less striking how incredibly fast babies change and grow.  I think about how not that long ago, as an adult, my sister was just a second grader and how here I am, wearing the same pair of sweatpants from high school and my sister is not barely an adult but halfway through with her 20s.  My other younger sister, approaching 30 really soon. It also made me realize that I am the same age as my dad when he moved his whole family to the US for a new life. I get it now more than I did before.  36 is not old, but it's not young. There's a chapter in Ramona the Pest, which I read every year, where the kindergarteners' teacher who's so young she probably hadn't been teaching very long, was sick and there was a substitute teacher.  The sub was older, like a mom.  When I first started teaching I was Ms. Binny's age and now as my students pointed out this year when I read that chapter, "She must be old like you, cause you're a mom".


Calvin is also doing all these really new things, reaching for things, exploring sounds and mouth shapes, rolling, sprouting teeth, eating solids.  It's so delightful to see him experience the world for the first time, and makes me pause to appreciate those things again as an adult. I'm having these feelings of really being excited that baby is growing, looking forward to the new ones to come, and a mix of anxiety as he hints towards the next milestones to come.  I look around my house and suddenly, it does feel kind of small, and kind of crowded, and maybe a little dangerous. In my panic, I bought a giant playmat and baby pen (jail) and have no where to put it.



My sister-in-law was describing how her kids were at Calvin's age, and I can see how those traits translates into the little people they are now. It's fun to imagine that how Calvin acts now might somehow be indicative of his personality.  I wonder what the students in my class were like at 6 months. He's so easy-going and sweet right now but he's the only baby I've ever had, and all the other babies that are in my mom groups seem similarly easy.  Maybe it only works in hindsight, rather than predictive.  

While it's hard for me to distinguish baby's personality, I am finding my parenting personality is forming into an identity, it's like a mix of who I think of myself as normally sans kids, but with slightly more overthinking, more underpacking, the same desire and inability to be minimalist, cheap, and still, and maybe more so, sort of a hoarder. 

It's getting easier, sort of, but somehow it still feels completely all consuming to take care of Calvin when I'm home. There's barely any time to eat or clean. I can't believe my mom did this with 6 in tow.  

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