Just your average comedians

When my children were infants,my blogs focused on stats from doctor visits and milestones - a first smile, a coo, a word. And, with Sawyer at least, I documented a lot of what I was going through as a new mother. I will never forget the time I wrote 500 words on folding laundry. I look back on some of those old posts now and wonder that anyone ever read them or commented on them. I can barely reread them myself. And in a few years when my kids are deep into sports and school the tales of potty training will be yawners.

So what is currently captivating me about my children is how similar they are. I thought siblings were supposed to be opposites, and in some ways they are - she's fearless where he is timid, she's right handed while he's left handed, she's needy and he's independent. But, Arden, who I had pegged as dark, brooding and angsty in utero turns out to be just as much of a comedian as her brother. They can crack each other up for hours in the back seat of the car. She's not just his audience, as I thought she would be, she's at the mike, making faces and cracking jokes and turning him into a puddle of giggles. And lately she's taken to wrestling with him, and she puts him down with half nelson type moves that make me wonder if she wasn't Andre the Giant a past life. I have no idea if its okay to let them wrestle like that. Watching the whole thing, I'm halfway between cracking up and cracking down.

And as far as those stats, we went to the doctor the other day for Sawyer's 3-year and Arden's 18-month checkups. They were both a little above the 50th percentile for height and a little below the 50th for weight. They are both developing just great, beyond their ages verbally (imagine that after all I worried with Sawyer), and meeting all the milestones. The only surprise was when the doctor (not our normal doctor and not the nurse practitioner I'd sworn off last time) commented that Sawyer has a "musical heart murmur." Considering I'd had the full fetal scan and everything looked fine and that nobody's ever mentioned it before, I was pretty shocked. But she didn't say anything else about it and didn't seem concerned. She just said that this is the age these things tend to show up. I know that will give my mother a fit, since heart problems run in the family and Ross's murmur caused her a great deal of consternation when he was young, but the doctor didn't seem worried and so I'm not either. I'll just be curious to see if it comes up again in the future, and if it does, maybe I'll ask more questions.

Also, I'd like to note that Arden has now passed the age that Sawyer was when she was born (17 months). That, in my mind, was always a big milestone. Dealing with Arden and her terrible twos temperament and thinking about having a newborn baby on top of that, I don't have clue how I survived.