Being a baby brother... lost in the shuffle

Sometimes, amid all the potty training and preschool preps, and demanding 2 year-old behavior, Alex seems to get lost in the shuffle. He's much less dramatic than his big sister. Honestly, he's a great baby and you don't hear a lot out of him, unless he's hungry. He smiles and giggles A LOT! So we tend to let him enjoy life and not shower him with as much attention as we did our first born, when she was the same age.

Are we cheating Alex? Gosh I hope not! That's certainly not the intention!

Troy brings it up from time to time and of course, I feel guilty. "Why aren't we doing this with him?" "We did that with Ella." The latest note is that we don't read to Alex at bedtime.

He normally goes down around 7:30. It's a pretty simple process. We carry him upstairs and Ella follows. That's her cue to begin the "wind-down" as well. Alex gets his pj's on, gets any medicine he needs, and gets some last minute snuggles. Big sister usually wants to climb into his crib to say goodnight. She snuggles up to his tummy, sometimes pulls out his binky for a kiss, and then she's ready to be lifted out. All we really have to do is turn on his continuous lullaby CD. (yes, it's Metallica, because Troy thought that would be "cool" for his son) and turn on the night light. By the time we get Ella settled in (:45 minutes later) Alex has drifted off to dreamland.

But I guess Troy's right. We have always read to Ella at bedtime. Now we read at least 2 or 3 books with her each night. Alex does deserve the same attention, and reading is important, for both of them.

So tonight, we switched up the routine just a bit. We read Alex a "feel the farm animals" book and let him touch and turn the pages. It was quick and the rest of the routine was the same. It felt a bit like we were going through the motions. But it was that way with Ella in those early days too. Not like he's going to beg us to read another before we turn out the lights.

I don't want him to have to be the "squeaky wheel" to get our attention. Yet, he does have to compete with a big sister. When Ella was this age, she was the center of our world. There were no other little distractions. We focused constantly on her development and her every need.

I hope and think that Alex is also benefitting from being a second child. He's seeing and hearing things that Ella was never exposed to this early on. Hopefully, he'll learn more quickly about how to do things, because he's watching his sister do it all first. In the meantime, I'm going to make a more concerted effort to keep him on track with "Baby Einstein" videos, a variety of solid foods, stories, peek-a-boo, etc... All the things we tried to do with Ella to help her along the way.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but Troy will remind me.