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As you may already know, I have two children, both girls, both amazing. But so very different. This has really been brought home to me over COVID as we are home together a lot.

The differences between them were really brought home when my two children wanted to lay on the recliner. My oldest child inspected the recliner, circling it, looking underneath it. She pushed on it, trying to get it to lay back. As she sat there staring at it, my younger daughter walked up to the chair, pulled the handle, and reclined it.

If you play D&D, my older daughter is a wizard. She is incredibly intelligent and hard-working. She decided she was going to read shortly after her sister was born as her father and I had a lot less time to read to her. And she did it. She was reading before she started 4K, and she was reading easy chapter books in kindergarten. She loves Rick Riordan despite being in early elementary school, and she will talk your ear off about any of his series. Her math skills match, and her teacher already has her working on simple algebra, decimals, and fractions.

But, she can’t work a recliner. We also had to put her in a series of extracurricular activities in hopes of her having at least an average amount of grace (dex) and strength. Which have had varying degrees of success. She still struggled to open the wrapper on her granola bar.

Then there’s her sister, who we expected to be similar. Same parents. Same house. Right? Wrong.

She is far more like a cleric than a wizard. She’s the one that pulls the handle on the recliner to make it recline. She’s also the one that when she can’t open the granola bar wrapper, gets the scissors off my desk and cuts it open. Yeah, she’s not yet in kindergarten.

She can also be brilliant, but whereas my older child is extremely motivated, my younger one is… not. She’s more like a diesel locomotive. Completely inert unless you motivate her. Even then, it’s a slow steady crawl at first. But once she decides she wants it and gets going? Whoooboy. Not much will stop her. The trick is figuring out how to motivate that diesel locomotive. Which I have not yet learned.

She is also incredibly creative. In Minecraft, she has built these elaborate worlds within worlds. She was explaining them to me the other night, and I was fascinated. So cool, so pure, in a completely uncomplicated way. Then, if you ever listen to her play, her imagination is amazing. She was explaining to me this whole fairy world and how the one had “the blood of the snow”. I still don’t know what that means, but it sounds cool.

Parenting is the hardest thing ever. Just when you think you’ve figured something out, they prove you wrong. But it is an interesting ride.