Raising your spirited child, take two

Nate was a very intense baby. I spent a lot (A LOT!!!) of time on the Baby Whisperer message boards specifically for spirited babies to get tips and tricks on dealing with it. He was so intense that before he turned six months old, I bought "Raising Your Spirited Child" and read it cover to cover. I was looking for that magic thing that would make it easier to parent Nate. This is what's hard to explain to people about that newborn phase. We never had to do this kind of stuff with Alex. He was always textbook and everything in the baby books applied to him.

After reading Joanna's post about reading it, I decided to re-read it now that I feel I know my kids a lot better than I did as a newbie twin parent. I also thought it would be good to re-read it as Nate is STILL so intense. Parenting him is like riding a roller coaster. It is never just flat. Everything is either super awesome or super terrible, with no in between. And frankly, I was also worried about him having ADD because he gets bored so easily and is constantly distracted, running from thing to thing.

I'm so glad I took time to re-read the book because two glaringly obvious things stuck out at me. First, he is off the charts in Intensity. Even when we play a five minute game, we never know if that five minutes will end in screaming and tears or shrieks of laughter. And he is also off the charts in Extroversion. The kid talked to like 10 different people in the airport security line, including explaining to the TSA people that he needed to get his backpack because he was going to Phoenix in the desert and blah blah blah.

I obviously did not need a book to tell me these things about Nate. What I did need a book to tell me was that he is this Intense because he feels these things this intensely. He does not do it for attention or to get his way. He just feels things with more feeling than most people. In my head, I kept thinking that eventually he would mature and not squeal with delight or scream when he's angry. I'm dumb because it's been almost four years and he has always been this way. This is who he is!

But the BIG lightbulb moment came in reading the traits that applied to Alex. Introversion. Sensitive. Adaptability (lack of). Regularity. In every single trait except Perceptive, Nate and Alex are opposites. Polar opposites. And thus THE REASONS they fight so often. Alex is an introvert who needs his own space to do his own thing but Nate needs to play with someone = fight. Alex wants to play the same game over and over while Nate constantly wants to change it = fight. Nate's willing to scream to get his way and Alex won't back down = fight.

Yin and yang, that's what we should have named. I've got a lot of introverted thinking to do after reading this book, if only Nate would be quiet for a minute.