Waiting for Godot

Seth has been a real character study for me after being swept up in the whirlwind that is Thomas for four years prior to his arrival. When Thomas was 18 mos. old, his favorite game was to run across the living room and have us pelt him with pillows. If he got knocked down, he only laughed harder. In fact, I once sent him careening into the wall and as I was running for him, imagining how I was going to explain his head wound in the ER, he emerged from the pillow pile, a huge red spot on his noggin, laughing hysterically.

He's also been a water baby all his life. Readers of this blog know that when we hit the beach in the summers, Thomas flings himself into the ocean, chaperoned or not, and has survived a few near drowning misses. He seems to have no fear, which is good in the sense that he has always been willing to try new things and adventures, and bad in the sense that I have been living with a near heart attack for most of his life as I wait for age and reason to finally overtake his lack of pain sensitivity and tendency to rush headlong into danger. I suspect I've got a number of years to go on that count.

Of course, it's a stereotype that the second child is often the categorical opposite of their first, but Seth and Thomas really do fit that bill. Where Thomas is easily distracted, Seth is methodical and while Thomas is easily pleased, Seth is a little more...discerning, let's call it that. Nothing seems to illustrate their differences as well as the following videos of a little sprinkler-running action in our backyard. Note that Thomas is not running through the sprinkler with such happy abandon just because he's older and is more comfortable with the experience. He was happily dousing himself in jets of water from the time he was a year old.

Sethie is my sensitive baby, the one who checks all the variables before turning the ignition, but I'm proud of him, too, that despite his obvious fear, he keeps going back to face it.