Monday, June 14, 2010

Personality

So, prior to having a baby, I had been told that you can see babies' personalities pretty early on. Not just if they're fussy or cheerful, but also how they sort of approach the world. Which kind of makes you think how much influence you, as a parent, have on them. I mean, as a daughter, I definitely know there are ways I see the world that are influenced by my parents, but maybe I was also inclined in those directions at birth. Who knows?

Anyway, I can definitely see glimmers of our cutie's personality. He is a very good-natured baby. I say this even though, for the past month, he has been getting up at 4:30 am every morning. For the day. When we finally stagger into his room at 6:00 am, he looks at us as if to say, "Where have you been??? The day is getting away from us!"

He's stoic. Every day I give him liquid vitamins fortified with iron, which taste awful. Like grape-flavored blood. Nasty. The first few times he cried and squirmed, trying to get away. Now he just opens his mouth and gets it over with. It makes me ashamed of the way cough syrup makes me gag.

He rocks to music. Seriously, he'll be sitting there on the living room floor, and if you start singing to him, or put on a CD with a nice bouncy beat, he'll start rocking back in forth, generally in time to the music. He does this when we sing songs in Mandarin class, and during music class as well. Usually he also grins. It is insanely cute.

He's very inquisitive. He looks at everything. I call him Linda Blair because when I am holding him, he is constantly whipping his head around to look at whatever's caught his interest--and he can get it pretty close to 180 degrees around. He has never looked at me when I am carrying him. *I* am a known quantity.

The looking-at-everything also includes things in his hands. This has really struck me, because of course as a new parent, you are warned that babies stick everything in their mouths. It's their way of exploring the world--grab something, put it in their mouths. And our cutie does put things in his mouth, but only after he has looked at them for a long time, turned them this way and that, passed them back and forth between his hands, and banged them on the floor. Then, he might--not always--put them in his mouth. Actually, he usually has to have seen something a few times before he'll deign to chew on it. This is very comforting to me as his mother.

He will sit by himself and play for quite a while. Last week he even started amusing himself to the point of laughing. By himself.

All of which leads me to think he is destined to be a scientist who spends a lot of time alone in a lab with the music blasting :-).

Moms, how much of your babies' personalities remained unchanged as they grew up?

2 comments:

Squirrelette said...

Yes, your little owl is insanely cute, and I think part of his cuteness definitely comes from his sweet and stoic nature.

Every time I watch him watching his hand ("gee this moves around... neat!") I crack up.

Signed,
She Who Thinks Your Kid Is Fantastic

Nancy said...

Actually, there are many things that are NOT the same about my kids now they're halfway grown: the one who didn't like to hear me sing ("Mama no sing!" was his response to any and all tunes, possibly because I sang when putting him down to sleep?), now loves Rock Band 2 and is begging for drum lessons; the little one who shrieked and hid her face if strangers even *looked* at her now begs for play dates 24/7 and wants to be a cheerleader; the boy I could barely keep up with at every park and playground at 18 months is now glued to his computer and must be forced outside; and the tough little girl who didn't flinch at multiple shots now screams when I brush her hair or she has a wrinkle in her sock. Go figure!